The available minimum wage literature, which is mostly based on US evidence, is not very useful for analyzing developing countries, where the minimum wage affects many more workers and labor institutions and law enforcement differ in important ways. The main contribution of this paper is to...

We incorporate health-damaging pollution into a three period overlapping generations model in which life expectancy, fertility and economic growth are all endogenous. We show that environmental factors can cause significant changes to the economy’s demographics. In particular, the...

Weak institutions are shown to create scope for public banks to play a growth-promoting role, even if such banks are less efficient than private banks.

This paper presents new evidence on the effects of the minimum wage using Brazilian monthly household and firm panel data between 1982 and 2000. By examining the effects on wages, employment and prices together we are able to provide an explanation for the small employment effects prevalent in...

It is well established in the literature that minimum wage increases compress the wage distribution. Firms respond to these higher labour costs by reducing employment, reducing profits, or raising prices. While there are hundreds of studies on the employment effect of the minimum wage, there are...

Several minimum wage variables have been suggested in the literature. Such a variety of variables makes it difficult to compare the associated estimates across studies. One problem is that these estimates are not always calibrated to represent the effect of a 10% increase in the minimum wage....

We build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity/child quality trade-off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital. By integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous...

In an overlapping generations economy with endogenous income growth, I combine themes from the work of Cooper et al. (2001), Kapur (2005), and Eaton and Eswaran (2009) in order to provide an example of an economy whose welfare dynamics are non-monotonic. Particularly, the evolution of workers’...

The labor share of income varies markedly across the set of democracies. A model of the political process, situated in a simple macroeconomic environment is analyzed in which the cause of this variation is linked to differences in the form of democracy - in particular the adoption of a...

We build an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility choices as well as public and private expenditures on health. We find that the complementary effect of public health services on private health expenditures can provide an additional explanation behind a salient feature of...