Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and...

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...

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration, there is no systematic empirical evidence on this issue. To motivate our analysis, we develop a simple theoretical model where migration policy is the result of the interaction between organized groups...

This paper addresses the adequacy of post-reform growth in Latin America in the 1990s on the basis of international comparison and other relevant standards. It analytically explores and empirically tests a number of hypotheses to explain the perceived dissatisfaction with growth performance.

This paper presents an analytical overview of recent contributions to the literature on the policy implications of capital flows in emerging and developing countries, focusing specifically on capital inflows as well as on the links between inflows and subsequent capital-flow reversals. The...

This paper examines the countercyclical policy options available to Latin American countries in the face of the current global economic crisis, concluding that most of the major countries in the region appear to possess the fiscal space (as measured by credible fiscal sustainability and debt...

This paper investigates how the measures of genetic distance between populations, which have been used in anthropology and historical linguistics, can be used in economics. What does the correlation between genetic distance and economic variables mean? Using the measure of genetic distance, a...

Do generations growing up during recessions have different socio-economic beliefs than generations growing up in good times? We study the relationship between recessions and beliefs by matching macroeconomic shocks during early adulthood with self-reported answers from the General Social Survey....

This paper examines the determinants of illegal immigration in the United States from Mexico from 1976 to 1995. The main challenge in the empirical work is that the observations are not the number of individuals that attempt to enter the United States illegally, but rather the number of...