This article analyses the distributional impact of remittances across two regions of Algerian emigration (Nedroma and Idjeur) using an original survey we conducted of 1,200 households in 2011. Remittances and especially the role played by foreign pensions decrease the Gini index by nearly 4 %...

Since the 1980s, China's government has eased restrictions on internal migration. This easing, along with rapid growth of the Chinese economy and substantial increases in foreign and domestic investments, has greatly stimulated internal migration. Earlier studies have established that migration...

We analyze the effects of regional structures on females' willingness to work as well as on the probability that non-employed women who are willing to work actually will engage in job search. Special permission was granted to link regional data to individual respondents in the German...

The focus of this paper is on the choice of the unemployed between becoming an entrepreneur or not. It contributes to the literature by empirically investigating two hitherto neglected issues: What is the impact of risk aversion and personal contact with a role model in shaping the decision to...

Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural...

We analyse a three-year panel data set of Russian firms spanning from 2000 to 2002 and we investigate the effect of regional institutional and economic factors on entry rates across time, industries and regions. The paper builds on a novel database and exploits inter-regional variation in a...

Harmonised microdata show a Gini coefficient for per capita total income of 45.3 percent in China 2002 and 33.6 percent in Russia 2003. A much larger urban to rural income gap in combination with a much smaller proportion of people living in urban areas in China are important reasons for this...

The paper looks at the effects of employment concentration on resource allocation with a particular focus on one-company towns in Russia defined as towns where a single company accounts for a significant share of total employment of the locality. Empirical analysis of firms' production functions...

This paper analyzes urban–rural disparities of China's child health and nutritional status using the China Health and Nutrition Survey data from 1989 to 2006. We investigate degrees of health and nutritional disparities between urban and rural children in China as well as how such disparities...

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...