This paper studies the pro-poor bias of contemporary trade policy in India by estimating the household welfare effects of eliminating the current protection structure. The elimination of a pro-poor trade policy is expected to have lower welfare gains or higher welfare loss at the low end of the...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

A central assumption of the canonical cheap talk literature is that people misreport their private information if this is to their material benefit. Recent evidence from laboratory experiments with student subjects suggests, however, that while many people do report the payoff-maximizing...

We model entry by entrepreneurs into new markets in developing economies with regulatory barriers in the form of licence fees and bureaucratic delay. Because laissez faire leads to quot;excessivequot; entry, a licence fee can increase welfare by discouraging entry. However, in the presence of a...

For two different regulatory standards, we examine the optimal minimum wage in a competitive labour market when the government is uncertain about supply and demand. Solutions are related to underlying supply and demand conditions, and the extent of uncertainty and of rationing efficiency. We...

This paper examines how stringent de facto firing regulations affect firm size throughout the developing world. We exploit a large firm level dataset across 63 countries and within country variation in the enforcement of the labor codes in countries with very different de jure firing...