The paper develops a simple model to demonstrate that, paradoxically, greater competition may exacerbate the problem of corruption. Market participants engaging in corrupt practices enjoy lower production costs -- maybe because they pay a bribe to avoid installing the environmental safeguards...

Much of game theory is founded on the assumption that individual players are endowed with preferences that can be represented by a real-valued utility function. However, in reality human preferences are often not transitive. This is especially true for the indifference relation, which can lead...

The"tapering talk"starting on May 22, 2013, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke first spoke of the possibility of the U.S. central bank reducing its security purchases, had a sharp negative impact on emerging markets. India was among those hardest hit. The rupee depreciated by 18 percent...

At least 120 million of the world's children aged 5 to 14 worked full-time in 1995, most of them under hazardous, unhygienic conditions, for more than 10 hours a day. This is an old problem worldwide but particularly so in Third World countries in recent decades. What has changed, with...

According to theory, a member of a collective-action household may or may not share knowledge with others in that household. Shared income gains from shared knowledge may well be offset by a shift in the balance of power within the family. But do literate members of the household share the...

The authors use the collective model of the household and show, theoretically, that as the woman's power rises, child labor will initially fall,but beyond a point it will tend to rise again. A household with a balanced power structure between the husband and the wife is least likely to send its...

The authors construct a model of second-generation rent control, describing a regime that does not permit rent increases for sitting tenants--or their eviction. When an apartment becomes vacant, however, the landlord is free to negotiate a new contract with a higher rent. They argue that this...

The authors present a new approach to evaluating the level of effective literacy in a region or country, one that takes into account the presence in a household of a literate person. They characterize the approach and give an empirical illustration of its use. They designed the new measures of...

Because most parents send their children to work when compelled by poverty, one would expect a rise in adult wage to lower child labor. However, if the rise in wage is achieved by a minimum wage law, its impact can be intriguing. It can, for instance, cause some adults to be unemployed, and send...

The paper argues that to achieve compliance of firms with regulations such as product quality or environmental or health standards it is better to have industries with a few large corporations than numerous small firms. A model is constructed to show that limited liability constraints bind more...