We introduce bureaucratic corruption in a simple way and examine its effect on government revenue when policies change. We show that a rise in the tax rate can lead to a fall in net revenue--a Laffer curve result due to the proportion of auditors that are corrupt and enforcement costs. It may...

Migration networks are usually captured by the number of people from the migrant's country in the host region. Using Mexican migration data, we analyze the effects of the usual network variable and two additional origin-village-specific variables on migrants' location choice.

Women who want to work often face many more hurdles than men. This is true in Tajikistan where there is a large gender gap in labour force participation. We highlight the role of two factors - international migration and education - on the labour force participation decision and its gender gap....

Several post-Soviet states have introduced policies to improve the relative economic, political or social position of formerly disadvantaged populations. Using one example of such policies - "Kazakhisation" in Kazakhstan - we investigate their impact on the comparative earnings of two directly...

We describe the simple analytics of the four main types of sales taxes under revenue neutrality: the retail sales tax, the value added tax, a cascading sales tax and a manufacturers' sales tax. The retail sales tax is shown to be equivalent to a value added tax. In order to produce equal...

his paper examines an important anomaly in the internal migration history of the former Soviet Union (FSU). While many cities were closed in the sense of explicitly limiting growth of city population from migration, it was difficult to assess the effectiveness of these controls. We analyze a...

This paper provides a statistical analysis of the attitudes towards foreigners displayed by European citizens. It is found that, holding other things constant, unemployed Europeans do not have more negative attitudes towards foreigners than the employed. On the other hand, an increased...

This paper analyzes the determinants and timing of return migration. Special attention is paid to the role of social and informational migration networks. A simple theoretical model of temporary migration demonstrates that the effect of migration networks on optimal migration duration is...

This paper investigates economic and political determinants of protection across the secondary (manufacturing) sector. Economic factors can be summarized by the infant industry argument and we expect industries which are relatively efficient compared to the rest-of-the-world to have low levels...

This paper extends the standard theoretical model of tax enforcement by allowing for the cross- matching of transactions in addition to the auditing of taxpayers. For the Value Added Tax (VAT) the matching of purchase and sales invoices is an important enforcement technique. The paper examines...