This paper tries to advance the perspective that the poor and the marginalized in society lack a sense of “participatory equity,†by building a new model where a person’s community identity matters, ex post, in determining if he or she will be poor, even though (unlike in the...

Some studies on child labor have shown that greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient is an explicit modeling of the labor market. We develop a simple model which...

Using a model of O-ring production function, the paper demonstrates how certain communities can get caught in a low-literacy trap in which each individual finds it not worthwhile investing in higher skills because others are not high-skilled. The model sheds light on educational policy. It is...

This paper uses efficiency wage theory and the existence of community-based sharing to hypothesize that labor markets in developing countries have multiple equilibria – the same economy can be stuck at different levels of unemployment with different levels of wages. The model is meant for...

Firms often give away free goods with the product they sell. Firms often give stock options to their managers and employees. Mixing these two practices--giving stocks to consumers who buy the firm's product--creates a deadly brew. People can be lured into buying this product, giving the...

Some studies on child labor have shown that, at the level of the household, greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient may be an explicit modeling of the labor...

This paper suggests some modifications in some standard approaches to project evaluation and, especially, the computation of the shadow wage rate so as to take into account regional disparities and inequality. The paper begins by clarifying the relation between the programming and planning...

This paper considers a developing nation that faces a foreign exchange shortage and hence its demand for foreign goods is limited both by its income and its foreign exchange balance. Availability of international credit relaxes the second constraint. We develop a simple model of strategic...