The cost of complying with a sanitary standard is certain. However, such regulatory measure is a source of uncertainty for exporting firms in relation to border rejections. Shipments may fail to pass inspections and may be refused entry into the importing country. We examine how the risk of...

Since the middle of the 1980s many European countries have reduced the strictness of their employment protection mainly by relaxing it for temporary jobs. These countries are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The article explores the...

Ranking methods are fundamental tools in many areas. Popular methods aggregate the statements of 'experts' in different ways. As such, there are various reasonable ranking methods, each one of them more or less adapted to the environment under consideration. This paper introduces a new method,...

We employ bootstrap methods (Efron (1979)) to test the effect of an important electoral reform implemented in Italy from 1993 to 2001, that moved the system for electing the Par-liament from purely proportional to plurality rule (for 75% of the seats). We do not find any effect on either the...

Tariff reductions have gender-specific effects on the labor market that change the relative bargaining power within households, which in turn affects child outcomes. We estimate how changes in parental labor supply due to these tariff reductions affect child schooling by focusing on young...

An increasing number of central banks implement monetary policy via two standing facilities: a lending facility and a deposit facility. In this paper we show that it is socially optimal to implement a non-zero interest rate spread. We prove this result in a dynamic general equilibrium model...

At the end of 2001, the Indian Supreme Court issued a directive ordering states to institute school lunches – known locally as 'midday meals' – in government primary schools. This paper provides a large-scale assessment of the enrollment effects of India's midday meal scheme, which offers...

We use a new dataset on non-resource GDP to examine the performance of commodity-exporting countries in terms of macroeconomic stability and economic growth in a panel of up to 129 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main findings are threefold. First, we find that overall government...

There is substantial consensus in the literature that positive uncertainty shocks predict a slowdown of economic activity. However, using U.S. data since 1950 we show that the macroeconomic response pattern to stock market volatility shocks has changed substantially over time. The negative...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium trade model for two integrated countries that are similar in all respects except of the prevailing labor market institutions. In one country, the labor market is perfectly competitive, while in the other country labor unions are active in a...