Large parts of the population of third-world immigrants to rich countries have not been successfully integrated into domestic labor markets and so are not productively employed. A potential "immigration surplus" has therefore not been realized. These circumstances have been explained with...

Minimum wage (MW) policies are an old and controversial tradition in Latin America. Controversy develops principally on the different effects that in standard economic analysis are associated to MW policies such as creation of larger unemployment, higher

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their empirical approach must produce insignificant...

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transi¬ tion to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical strategy is...

The paper considers a two-sector economy with a constant population: The public sector, with stable productivity, and a private sector, with productivity growth. Baumol’s law says that such an economy has no steady state. It is demonstrated what this means. Two attempts to uphold a policy that...

The AEL (aid effectiveness literature) studies the macroeconomic effect of development aid using cross-country or panel data econo¬metrics. It contains about 100 papers of which 43 study whether development aid increases accumulation in the recipient country. Taking all 43 aid-accumulation...