This paper undertakes a statistical analysis of the effect of minimum wages (MWs) on different population groups. The underlying question for this analysis relates to the probability bias exerted by certain protective government regulations in terms of the unemployment prospects of specific...

Poor-area development programs- in which the government transfers extra resources to unusually poor areas -have been widely used to fight poverty. There has been some research on such programs, but little is known about their impact on household living standards over time. The authors address...

High-quality institutions -- reflected in such factors as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts -- mitigate the adverse economic effects of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine (1997)...

An important objective of public spending is to raise household living standards, particularly for the poor. But how can final impacts on this objective best be assessed? Evaluating a policy's impact requires assessing how different things would have been in its absence. But the counterfactual...

The authors use data from Nicaragua to examine the impact of the award of registered and nonregistered title on land values and on investments attached to land. They find that receipt of registered title increases land values by 30 percent and greatly increases the propensity to invest, bringing...

This study uses time-series of household data from eleven developing countries to test several hypotheses about saving behavior. Besides just widening the scope of information being used to test the hypotheses, the data set in this study has the advantage of a consistent definition across...

On September 30, 1990, the first World Summit for Children promised to reduce child mortality and malnutrition. It set targets to be reached by the year 2000. Although it established no explicit goals on child labor, the targets included basic education for all children and the completion of...

The author investigates the effects of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on the net foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows of member countries using a comprehensive database of PTAs in a panel setting. He finds that PTA membership is associated with a positive change in net FDI inflows, and...

In the 1980s the Thai government tried to legalize squatters by issuing special titles that restricted the sale and rental of the land. Using data from 2,874 farming households collected in 1997, the author finds that in places where these government titles where issued, leased plots are more...

This paper investigates who is most affected by informal competition and how regulation and enforcement affect the extent and nature of this competition. Using newly-collected enterprise data for 6,466 manufacturing formal firms across 14 countries in Latin America, the authors show that formal...