infonet-economy

This paper studies tax competition in an economic geography model that allows for agglomeration economies with trade costs and heterogeneous firms. We find that the Nash equilibrium involves the large country charging a higher tax than the small nation. Lower trade costs lead to an intensification of competition, a drop in Nash tax rates, and a narrowing of the gap. Since large,…

Barriers to immigration of low-skilled workers from developing countries into the advanced countries prevent many potential migrants from leaving their countries of origin. With very low home-country wages in relation to the cost of undocumented migration, the opportunity to migrate often hinges on becoming indebted to a human smuggling organization or family and friends. This paper…

This paper develops a model of optimizing behavior of asylum seekers whose objective is to reach an advanced country. Their personal characteristics and the challenges anticipated along the way determine whether they try to reach the ultimate destination with the aid of human smugglers or by applying for resettlement with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In…

This paper uses probit and ordered probit methods to examine the impact of banks’ policies in terms of cost efficiency, capitalization, activity diversification, credit growth and profitability, on the loan quality in the Tunisian banking sector after controlling for the effects of firm-specific characteristics and macroeconomic conditions. Using a data set with detailed information…

We measure the response of household consumption of different income groups to social spending during the 2002-2012 period using the aggregated Household Budget Survey Data. We find that households respond more strongly to changes in pensions than to changes in allowances and in-kind transfers. The very weak response of households to changes in allowances and in-kind transfers, both…

We use a large sample of export transactions from customs files across six developing countries and several years to explore the extent of pricing to market and volume responses to exchange-rate variations in the East African Community (EAC), a customs union, and a control group of exporters from developing countries outside the region. We find that, relative to the control group,…

A guest-worker program can be a very flexible and convenient way of meeting labor shortages in a host country, assuming that the migrants obeythe rules. This paper investigates the conditions under which guest workers have sufficient incentives for voluntary return to their country of origin when their work permits expire. The analysis is conducted in the context of a lenient…

In this paper, we estimate the impact on local household livelihoods of the Natural Forest Protection Programme (NFPP), the largest logging ban programme in the world that aims to protect watershed and conserve natural forests. In doing so we use a series of policy evaluation micro-econometric techniques to assess the impacts of the NFPP on two interrelated facets of household…