This paper uses two representative household budget surveys from the Kyrgyz Republic to analyze factors influencing participation and returns from different types of nonfarm activities in 2005 and 2006. Nonfarm activities are found to be most important for the poor, who are pushed out of...

In this paper I evaluate the effects of a regional experiment that reduced payroll taxes by 3–6 percentage points of the firms' wage sum in northern and eastern Finland. I estimate the effect of the payroll tax reduction on firms' employment levels, wage sum and profits, and on workers' hourly...

This paper appreciates India's role as development partner for HRD in the Mekong sub-region. The paper examines bilateral HRD collaboration between India and the member countries of Mekong region with the case based analysis. The paper is presented in the four parts. Part -1 is introductory one;...

The importance of using natural experiments in economic research has long been recognized. Yet, it is only in recent years that natural experiments have become an integral part of the economist's analytical toolbox, thanks to the efforts of Meyer, Card, Peters, Krueger, Gruber, and others. This...

Immigrants are widely perceived as being highly entrepreneurial and important for economic growth and innovation. This is reflected in immigration policies and many developed countries have created special visas and entry requirements in an attempt to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Not...

In this paper we evaluate the effects of a regional experiment that reduced payroll-taxes by 3-6 percentage points for three years in Northern Finland. We match each firm in the target region with a similar firm in a comparison region and estimate the effect of the payroll-tax reduction by...

United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts describes the American judiciary as the envy of other constitutional democracies. But in one respect, the judiciary apparently trails others: judicial pay. Citing higher salaries of judges in other countries, Chief Justice Roberts and...

Policy debates about the appropriate risk levels for individual retirement plans and social retirement plans (like social security) often pay insufficient attention to the inescapable trade-off between payment risk (the risk of insufficient funding for anticipated benefits) and short fall risk...

In this paper we estimate the causal effect of lowering the public income transfers administered to newly arrived refugee immigrants in Denmark - the so-called starthelp - using a competing risk mixed proportional hazard framework. The two competing risks are exit to job and exit out of the...