Estimates of the benefits of malaria reduction derived from countries that eradicated the disease are not necessarily applicable to sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria incidence and mortality is high and all eradication attempts were unsuccessful. This paper estimates the effects of malaria on schooling using geographic and survey data from Ethiopia. I show that self-reported malaria is highly co...

Regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest. Such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite. We argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full-scale democratization, despite its apparent costs to themselves, may be that lesser concessions would be viewed as a...

This paper contributes to the literature on temporary migration by developing and solving a model of repeated circular migration that accounts for saving behavior. Using Mexican Migrant Project data on undocumented migrants and non-migrants, I estimate the parameters of the model through the Method of Simulated Moments. The intensity of U.S. border enforcement is found to have a significant pos...

Migration decision-making in developing economies is addressed from the perspective of status in the labor force (unemployed or unemployed) and traditional concerns with utility maximization are expanded to include the role of assets and access to capital markets. A dynamic model is formulated and the results reveal that the migration mechanism is efficient when workers have access to borrowing...

We study the determinants of international migration with special attention to the role of institutional factors other than economic and demographic fundamentals. We evaluate the impact of political institutions and of those institutions specifically targeted at attracting migrants. For a dataset on 19th century migration, we find that economic and demographic differentials play a major role, b...

Despite the growing importance of privatization in economic reform programs, little is known about its empirical effects on wages. Using individual-level data from Mexico, I estimate the effects of privatization on industry wages in four cases: the commercial airlines, Teléfonos de México, Siderúrgica Mexicana, and the commercial banks. I find that: (1) privatization is associated with statisti...

We construct a variant of the neoclassical model with endogenous entry and operation decisions by …rms. The model is calibrated to match key features of the distribution of …rms, by age and by size, for the U.S. A higher entry cost leads to a higher degree of misallocation of productive factors across …rms, lower TFP, and lower output. In the data entry costs average 58 percent of per capita GD...

This paper uses an institutional approach to investigate the relationship between the regional institutional environment and regional new firm formation. The importance of perceived attitudes regarding private enterprises, local taxes, political majority, the size of the government sector and perceived rules and bureaucracy on new firm formation in 286 Swedish municipalities are investigated. T...

This paper explores the link between Brazil’s political institutions and its disappointing productivity and growth in recent decades. Although political institutions provide the president with incentives and the instruments to pursue monetary stability and fiscal discipline they simultaneously raise the costs of achieving those very objectives. The insulation of certain expenditures from presid...

This paper examines the role of economic freedom in the empirical relationship between business cycle volatility and long-run growth across countries. In a diverse sample of 99 countries, it is shown that accounting for economic freedom’s influence on volatility mitigates or even eliminates the negative impact of volatility on growth. It is also possible that the impact of volatility on growth ...