Illegal immigration has been the focus of much debate in receiving countries, but little is known about what drives individual attitudes towards illegal immigrants. To study this question, we use the CCES survey, which was carried out in 2006 in the United States. We find evidence that - in...

We extend the theoretical framework in Cuñat and Melitz (2007) to a many-country setup where countries exhibit different degrees of labor market flexibility. We rely on the insights from a recent paper by Costinot (2009) to obtain precise predictions about comparative advantage in this setting:...

We study how financial frictions and the saving rate shape the long-run effects of trade liberalization on income, consumption, and the distribution of wealth in financially underdeveloped economies. In our model, regardless of whether the capital account is open or not, trade liberalization...

I perform Arellano-Bond GMM estimations using panel data over the period 1995-2008 and explore the growth effects of Africa’s trade with China, distinguishing between the effect of imports and the effect of exports, and controlling for the role of export concentration. Four important results...

This paper studies how specialization, measured by industry shares in GDP, is affected by technology and factor endowments. The empirical methodology takes into account variable factor utilization with capital utilization calculated from the consumption of electricity. Estimation results show...

This paper compares the optimal tariff and revenue maximizing tariffs in the presence of partial privatization. We show that in an international mixed oligopoly with asymmetric costs and partial privatization, when the marginal cost of the privatized firm exceeds a critical value, maximum...

Informal economy involving unrecorded, unregistered, extra legal activities employs majority of the workforce in the developing world. Such extra legal existence of informal manufacturing and service sectors is facilitated through extortion by agents of political forces in power. Such extortion...

The carbon tax is a major instrument for curbing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warning. Y et its adoption has been limited because of concerns over its effects on economic growth, income distribution, and international competitiveness. The paper shows that policymakers con minimize...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

Most of the large tariff reductions achieved in multilateral tradenegotiations have involved tariff-cutting formulas such as the "Swiss"formula. However, wide variations in initial tariff rates between activeparticipants call for new approaches under the Doha Development Agenda.This paper...