For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. This contrasts sharply with another salient feature of the Chinese land policy reform landscape that has gone on largely unnoticed - the addition of newly cultivated land in China through land...

Appropriate assessment of the social value of market access is at the core of a broad range of inquiries in trade research. A selection include: the appraisal of industry-level production and consumption distortions due to selective trade liberalization and partial tax reform; the construction...

Why do some countries establish their own national eco-labeling programs and some do not? In this paper, we provide both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence suggesting that the answer to this question can shed new light on three questions that have taken center-stage in the trade and...

Illegal migrants supply a valuable productive input: effort. But their status as illegals means that these migrants face a strictly positive probability of expulsion. A return to their country of origin entails reduced earnings when the wage at origin is lower than the wage at destination. This...

This paper presents a set of reflections on what gives rise to remittances, which constitute a major part of the impact of migration on economic development in the migrants' own countries. The collage of reasons presented serves to illustrate that remittance behavior is the outcome of an...

The naturalization of asylum seekers is modeled as an economic problem. In choosing their level of investment in host-country-specific human capital, asylum seekers take into consideration the probability of their being naturalized. The government of the host country chooses the probability of...

In this paper I delineate novel policy repercussions suggested by my research on "The New Economics of the Brain Drain". In section 1, I provide a succinct account of the model that inspires the derivation of several new policy implications. In sections 2 through 5, I present the policy...

In this paper I study policy responses to an increase in post-merger distress. I consider the integration of regions and nations as a merger of populations which I view as a revision of social space, and I identify the effect of the merger on aggregate distress. The paper is based on the premise...