There exist legal channels for informational lobbying of US policymakers by foreign principals. Foreign governments and private sector principals frequently and intensively use this institutional channel to lobby on trade and tourism issues. This paper empirically studies whether such lobbying...

Informal self-employment is a major source of employment in developing countries. Its cyclical behavior is important to our understanding of the functioning of LDC labor markets, but turns out to be surprisingly complex. We develop a flexible model with two sectors: a formal salaried (tradable)...

This paper exploits an extensive Brazilian micro-enterprise survey and the 1996 introduction of a business tax reduction and simplification scheme (SIMPLES) to examine three questions. First, do high tax rates and complex tax regulations really constitute a barrier to the formalization of...