We study how the shadow economy affects pollution and how this effect depends on corruption levels in public administration. Production in the shadow economy allows firms to avoid environmental regulation policies; a large informal sector may be accompanied by higher pollution levels. Our...

The paper studies the revenue, efficiency, and distributional implications of a simple strategy of offsetting tariff reductions with increases in destination-based consumption taxes so as to leave consumer prices unchanged. We employ a dynamic micro-founded macroeconomic model of a small open...

What are the dynamic consequences of comprehensive integration shocks? The answer to this question appears all but trivial. We set up a dynamic macroeconomic model of a small open economy where both capital and labor are mobile and there are increasing returns to scale at the aggregate level....

Convex vacancy creation costs shape firms' responses to trade liberalization. They induce capacity constraints by increasing firms' cost of production, leading a profit maximizing firm not to fully meet the increased foreign demand. Hence, firms will only serve a few export markets. More...

With endogenous skills and given technology, labor market integration necessarily lowers welfare of the left-behind in a poor sending country, even if all agents face identical emigration probabilities. This is in sharp contrast to the case of exogenous skill supply

Minimum hourly wages were randomly imposed on firms posting job openings in an online labor market. A higher minimum wage raised the wages of hired workers substantially. However, there was some reduction in hiring and large reductions in hours-worked. Treated firms hired more productive...

This paper investigates the distributional and efficiency consequences of an environmental tax reform, when the revenue from the green tax is recycled by varying labor tax rates. We build a general equilibrium model with imperfect heterogeneous labor markets, pollution consumption externalities,...

This paper extends the Diamond (1980) model with labor unions to study optimal income taxation and to analyze whether unions can be desirable for income redistribution. Unions bargain with firms over wages in each sector and firms unilaterally determine employment. Unions raise the efficiency...

This paper shows that outsourcing of parts of the workforce in unionized firms leads to wage moderation and as long as the share of the outsourced workforce is not too large, this wage moderation effect on domestic employment outweighs the direct substitution effect so that domestic employment...