This paper develops a simple two-period model of public good provision within a federation. A national public good is provided to both states by the federal government, while a local public good is supplied by each state government. The federal government levies a proportional income tax, and in...

This paper studies why illegal immigration is widespread. We develop a political agency model in which a politician decides on an immigration target and its enforcement, facing uncertainty on the supply of migrants. Illegal immigration can arise for two reasons: the policy maker may be unable to...

We model the role of a parliament’s structure in shaping the accountability of elected representatives. In a setting in which lawmakers interact with a lobby through a bargaining process and with voters by means of elections, we show that only a single legislative body who can make take it or...

This paper develops a theory of the endogenous formation of a common market in a three-country, two-factor political economy model. In the status quo, Home and Foreign implement nondiscriminatory policies toward international factor flows in order to maximize the domestic median voter's welfare....

This paper develops a theory of the endogenous formation of a common market in a three-country, two-factor political economy model. In the status quo, Home and Foreign implement non-discriminatory policies towards international factor flows, as to maximize the domestic median voter's welfare....

Despite restrictive migration policies, large numbers of undocumented migrants reside in many destination countries. If official migration targets are not enforced, why are they devised? To address this puzzle, we develop a political agency model with uncertainty on the migrants' supply, where...

Using census data for 1996, 2001 and 2007 the authors study the labor market effect of immigration in South Africa. In this period the share of foreign born over the total population has grown by almost fifty percent, and both the characteristics and geographical distribution of immigrants show...

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work...