The authors start from the premise that governments act as agents of the public in regulating pollution, using the instruments at their disposal. But when formal regulatory mechanisms are absent or ineffective, communities will seek other means of translating their preferences into reality....

Environmental degradation can inflict serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods often depend on natural resource use and their living conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained options may induce the poor to...

As is evident from public finance principles, redistribution objectives do not influence environmental policies if there are other, costless means of redistribution. How does optimal environmental protection depend on redistribution objectives? The authors develop a framework that treats air...

If the marginal gains from investment in physical capital depend positively on knowledge, but a household cannot hire skilled labor to compensate for low skills, then even if it has access to credit, the household will achieve lower returns than an educated household. If, as is common, the...

Stories on the positive and negative effects of globalization on workers in developing countries abound. But a comprehensive picture is missing and many of the stories are ideologically charged. This paper reviews the academic literature on the subject, including several studies currently under...

Where do industries locate within a metropolitan area? Do different industrial sectors have different patterns of location/clustering? Can these patterns be understood with reference to industry characteristics? What is the geographical relationship between clusters of different types of...

Combining microeconomic evidence with macroeconomic theory, the authors present an integrated approach to wage and employment determination in an economy where firms pay above market"efficiency wages"to prevent trained workers from quitting. The model offers predictions about the behavior of...

The authors use a retrospective survey of 9,608 individuals, aged 16 to 75, to monitor the effects of Estonia's economic transition on wages and employment. Estonia is an interesting case because of its early adoption of relatively free labor market policies. Estonia's transition led to rapid...

The slowdown and possible reversal in the rural-to-urban flow of labor in Ghana is symptomatic of a basic shortcoming in the country's economic recovery: the inadequate growth of the productive sector in the non-agricultural economy. The rate of growth of GDP has been adequate but much of the...

The authors derive a methodology for analyzing logit models in a rotating panel context. They then apply the technique to test two theories of why and when salaried workers enter the informal self-employed sector. In the traditional view, workers fired from formal jobs queue in the informal...