Intermediaries helping individuals and rms with the government bureaucracy are common in developing countries. Although such bureaucracy intermediaries are, anecdotally,linked with corruption and welfare losses, few formal analyses exist. In our model, a government license can benet individuals....

In this paper, we warn on the overoptimistic conclusions led by weak instruments testing when good leverage points are present in the first stage of an IV estimation. Some simulations and an empirical application are provided to illustrate the point raised.

This paper describes the Stata implementation of Baltagi and Li's (2002) series estimator of partially linear panel data models with fixed effects. After a brief description of the estimator itself, we describe the new command xtsemipar. We then simulate data to show that this estimator performs...

We study the impact of a large-scale economic crisis on gender equality, using historical data from Kazakhstan in the late 19th – early 20th century. We focus on sex ratios (number of women per man) in Kazakh nomadic population between 1898 and 1908, in the midst of large-scale Russian...

Firm entry and exit flows in the retailing and consumer services may be viewed as market equilibrating processes. Local markets with considerable market room and high unemployment ought to be characterized by high subsequent entry rates and low exit rates. However, lack of entrepreneurial...

Our paper explores the economic conditions that lead third parties to intervene in ongoing internal wars. We develop a formal model that ties together some of the main forces driving the decision to interfere in a civil war, including the economic benefits accruing from the intervention and the...

We study how gradualism -- increasing required levels (“thresholds”) of contributions slowly over time rather than requiring a high level of contribution immediately -- affects individuals’ decisions to contribute to a public project. Using a laboratory binary choice minimum-effort...

Asymmetric climate policies are expected to distort the level-playing field regarding international trade, singularly to the detriment of small open economies. The paper develops a flexible method that provides essential input regarding the design of offsetting measures at the sectoral level. It...

Daily collectors operate worldwide; they charge a fee in exchange for the collection of their client's deposits. The clients recover their savings after one month. With a negative nominal return of -3.3% per month, the service is quite expensive but nonetheless prevalent among the very poor. The...

We analyze the individualization of farm units in Mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields. While a moral-hazard-in-team problem plagues production on the latter, a dilemma arises insofar as the...