Federal and state governments spend well over a billion dollars a year on programs that encourage employment development in disadvantaged labor markets through the use of subsidies and tax credits. In this paper we use an estimation approach that is valid under relatively weak assumptions to...

Much of the existing literature on social security has taken the extreme assumption that individuals have little or no altruism; this paper takes an opposite assumption that there is full two-sided altruism. When households insure members that belong to the same family line, privatizing social...

This paper documents how informal employment in Mexico is countercyclical, lags the cycle and is negatively correlated to formal employment. This contributes to explaining why total employment in Mexico displays low cyclicality and variability over the business cycle when compared to Canada, a...

This paper presents and describes a new dataset of capital control restrictions on both inflows and outflows of 10 categories of assets for 100 countries over the period 1995 to 2013. Building on the data first presented in Schindler (2009) and other datasets based on the analysis of the IMF's...

This paper presents an integrated overview of the literature linking institutions, financial development and economic growth. From the large body of research on institutional development, the paper first selects those contributions that make it possible to study the role of institutional...

Financial crises in both emerging and developed economies have been characterized by large output drops and spikes in unemployment and interest rates. To account for these stylized facts this paper builds a business cycle model where financial and la- bor market frictions interact as...

Countercyclical country interest rates have been shown to be both a distinctive characteristic and an important driving force of business cycles in emerging market economies. In order to account for this, most business cycle models of emerging market economies have relied on ad hoc and exogenous...

Rationality of early release data is typically tested using linear regressions. Thus, failure to reject the null does not rule out the possibility of nonlinear dependence. This paper proposes two tests which instead have power against generic nonlinear alternatives. A Monte Carlo study shows...