Today's labor-scarce economies have open trade and closed immigration policies, while a century ago they had just the opposite, open immigration and closed trade policies. Why the inverse policy correlation, and why has it persisted for almost two centuries? This paper seeks answers to this dual...

It has traditionally been argued that the development of telecommunications infrastructure is dependent on the quality of countries' political institutions. We estimate the effect of political institutions on the diffusion of three telecommunications services and find it to be much smaller in...

Despite the increasing importance of remittances in total international capital flows, the relationship between remittances and growth has not been adequately studied. This paper studies one of the links between remittances and growth, in particular how local financial sector development...

Recent research convincingly shows that crises beget reform. Although the consensus is that economic crises foster macroeconomic stabilization, it is silent on which types of crises cause which types of reform. Is it economic or political crises that are the most important drivers of structural...

In most destination countries, immigration policies are increasingly tilted toward the most skilled individuals. Whether this shift hurts economic prospects in sending countries, as argued by the traditional brain drain literature, is somewhat controversial. The most recent literature has...

I analyze individual attitudes towards trade and immigration in comparative terms. I find that individuals are on average more pro-trade than pro-immigration across several countries. I identify a key source of this difference: the cleavage in trade preferences, absent in immigration attitudes,...

The paper reviews national and international experiences with different combinations of in-work benefits, subsidized employment, statutory minimum wages and implicit minimum wages defined by social assistance provisions. It calls for a cautious approach regarding the introduction of additional...

This paper assesses the empirical relationship between the liberalization of international trade and the economic status of women. Although historically globalization is not generally linked to the advancement of women, several recent country studies find export led growth in middle and low...

Host countries have implemented permanent and guest-worker (GW) immigration programs in recent decades, while the temporary movement of service providers under Mode IV of the GATS is one of the issues being negotiated at the Doha Round of the WTO. Though decisions on what programs to adopt have...