The model presented here reproduces the empirical fact that poorer countries show a higher incidence of child labor and time-intensive care of retired parents, whereas richer countries have negligible child labor and people indulge in money-intensive care of the old. For that purpose, the effect...

Small farmers in many tropical developing countries practice swidden agriculture. A key aspect of swidden agriculture is the time period during which the land is left fallow. This paper uses a new ecological-economic approach to study the fallow period and to determine the optimal length of this...

The aim of this study is to assess the effect of the change in infrastructure capital on the cost structure of the Chilean economy, and thereby on productivity, differentiating between two key institutional periods. A further aim is to establish the extent to which infrastructure capital...

The paper presents a unified treatment of optimal trade policy for a small country. The well-known results for duopoly and competitive markets emerge as benchmark cases of the authors' model. In addition, it is shown that changes in market structure have nonmonotonic effects on optimal tariffs....

The paper attempts to combine the traditional learning model with the recent theory of economic growth using Maddison's long-run real GDP per capita data of the three fastest growing countries in East Asia: Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The authors first explain games of catching-up among nations,...

The paper examines foreign aid in the context of a dynamic Ricardian model of trade and development that highlights the role of learning in both the initial adoption of new technologies and products and their eventual transfer from developed to developing countries. When aid is paid as a pure...

In a model of a joint venture between a local and a foreign firm who provide complementary inputs, this paper derives optimal ownership structures under different sharing rules. The local firm's profits may be maximized by assigning a majority share to the foreign firm. Efficiency (i.e., the...

The authors formalize the role of legal infrastructure in economic development in a general-equilibrium model with endogenously determined property rights enforcement. The mutual importance of property rights protection and market production is illustrated by the model's multiplicity of...

South Africa's unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, and it has important distributional implications. The paper examines both entry into and duration of unemployment using data for the mid-1990s. A probit model of unemployment shows an important role for race, education, age,...

The paper looks at the subjective evaluations of a number of coping strategies that respondents undertook to mitigate the effect on their welfare of the Russian financial crisis. Given the dramatic drop in formal cash incomes, how are people able to adapt? What are the relative importance and...