This paper analyzes analyze the impact of deregulatory reforms in India during the 1990s, which eliminated compulsory industrial licensing, on manufacturing firms' investment decisions. The paper finds an economically and statistically significant positive effect of delicensing on investment. It...

Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. The authors conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the Philippines testing the impact of...

International migration offers individuals and their families the potential to experience immediate and large gains in their incomes, and offers a large number of other positive benefits to the sending communities and countries. However, there are also concerns about potential costs of...

Most migration surveys do not ask about the legal status of migrants due to concerns about the sensitivity of this question. List randomization is a technique that has been used in a number of other social science applications to elicit sensitive information. This paper trials this technique by...

This paper examines the effects of a government regularization program offered to half a million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. For this purpose, 2,232 surveys of refugee families were collected and used to compare refugees who arrived in Colombia around a specified eligibility date in 2018....

The authors analyze recent efforts at international cooperation to limit illegal migration, particularly through the use of legal migration avenues like guest worker schemes. They show that while guest worker schemes may be desirable as an avenue of international migration, they are an...

In absence of deposit insurance, underdeveloped financial systems can exhibit a coordination failure between banks, unable to commit on safe asset holding, and depositors, anticipating low deposit repayment in bad states. This paper shows conditions under which a government can solve this...

Financial regulation affects government revenue whenever it imposes both the mandatory quantity and price of government bonds. This paper studies a banking regulation adopted by the National Bank of Ethiopia in April 2011, which forces all private banks to purchase a fixed negative-yield...

Regulation is purportedly enacted to serve specific social purposes. In reality, however, it follows a more complex political economy process, where legitimate social goals are mixed with the objectives of particular interest groups. Whatever its justification and objectives, regulation can have...

The role of innovation in improving productivity might vary according to a country's relative position in technology advancement. Frontier countries might benefit more from policies that promote firms' internal innovation (create), while follower countries would gain more from policies favoring...