We study an important mechanism underlying employee referrals into informal low skilled jobs in developing countries. Employers can exploit social preferences between employee referees and potential workers to improve discipline. The profitability of using referrals increases with referee stakes...

Empirical studies suggest little impact of foreign aid on growth on average. As aid can be viewed as a sovereign rent akin to natural resource rents, it is likely that rent seeking plays a role in explaining this disappointing outcome. The analytic starting point of this paper is the long chain...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that the association between property rights institutions and income is weaker in countries with high social divisions. It argues that social divisions should have a negative effect on perceived institutional inclusiveness, which in turn should depress...

A key event in economic history was the independence of nearly ninety former colonies after World War II. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative evidence, we argue that independence often constituted an institutional disequilibrium that the new regimes reacted to in very different ways. We...

This paper represents the first attempt to formalise the relationship between remittances inflow and social violence by developing a model which predicts that migrants’ remittances would lead to the reduction of social conflict in the recipient economy under the condition that remittances...

We analyze an economy with two main features: labor mobility goes together with knowledge transfer and firm productivity increases with the exchange of ideas. Each firm develops some specific knowledge that will be transmitted to the rest of the industry through the mobility of workers. We study...

A striking feature of OECD labor markets in the 1990s has been the very rapid increase of temporary agency work. We augment the equilibrium unemployment model as developed by Pissarides and Mortensen with temporary work agencies in order to focus on their role as matching intermediaries and to...

Providing health insurance involves a trade-off between the benefits from risk spreading and the costs due to moral hazard. Focusing on pharmaceuticals consumption, this paper examines theoretically whether reference pricing, requiring individuals to pay the price difference if, in this case,...