With fortuitously timed data collected before, during and after a major macro-financial crisis in Bulgaria, we revisit several hypotheses in the economics and nutritional literature related to the tendency of households to smooth their nutritional status over time. We explore the dietary impact...

What does it mean to be in the informal sector? Many characterizations have been used in the literature, for example, firms that are unregistered or employ a small workforce or firms/economic enterprises that do not have access to formal capital markets. But many people participate in both...

In this paper we try to understand the phenomena whereby a large proportion of the population evades tax payments. We present a model which incorporates elements from the theory of information cascades with the standard model of tax evasion and analyze the connection between the decision of a...

Some immigrants try to keep their ethnicity hidden while others become ever deeply more mired in their home culture. We argue that among immigrants this struggle manifests itself in the ethnic goods they choose to consume. Different types of ethnic goods have vastly different effects on...

Our analysis of a rich representative household survey for Malawi, where patrilineal and matrilineal institutions coexist, suggests that (a) in matrilineal societies the likelihood of cash crop cultivation by a household increases with the extent of land owned (or de facto controlled) by males,...

Culture is not new to the study of migration. It has lurked beneath the surface for some time, occasionally protruding openly into the discussion, usually under some pseudonym. The authors bring culture into the open. They are concerned with how culture manifests itself in the migration process...

Within immigrant society different groups wish to help the migrants in different ways ﾖ immigrant societies are multi-layered and multi-dimensional. We examine the situation where there exists a foundation that has resources and that wishes to help the migrants. To do so they need migrant...

We examine the phenomenon of forsaken schooling resulting from opportunities abroad. The brain-drain/gain literature takes as its starting point the migration of educated/professional labor from poor origin countries to richer host countries. While high-skilled migration is worrisome, many...

How does informal economic activity respond to increased financial inclusion? Does it become more entrepreneurial? Does access to new financing options change the gender configuration of informal economic activity and, if so, in what ways and what directions? We take advantage of nationwide data...

With the use of panel data constructed from the 1995 and 1997 Bulgarian Integrated Household Surveys, this paper explores the sectoral reallocation of labour by gender. In Bulgaria, men and women started the transition on an almost equal standing, allowing us to concentrate our attention on the...