Recent scholarship on exchange rate regime choice seeks to explain why some countries fix their exchange rate to an anchor currency, but it neglects the question to which currency countries peg. This article posits that an understanding of the choice of anchor currency also improves political...

Globalisation critics are concerned that increased trade openness and foreign direct investment exacerbate existing economic disadvantages of women and foster conditions for forced labour. Defenders of globalisation argue instead that as countries become more open and competition intensifies,...

This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking,...

We analyze the spread of policies dealing with international trafficking in human beings. Arguing that countries are unlikely to make independent choices, we identify pressure, externalities and learning or emulation as plausible diffusion mechanisms for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking...

Summary Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. We examine why many governments do not. First, mortality is lower in countries with higher earthquake propensity, where the payoffs to investments in mortality prevention are...

This article examines the impact of environmental regulation within countries as well as regulatory distance between countries on international technology transfer. We employ a recently-assembled dataset of automobile emission standards and corresponding data on non-resident patent filing of...

This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human...

This paper analyzes the theoretical and empirical links between inequality in human development on the one hand and sustainability on the other. It specifically looks at causality in both directions. Inequality in various dimensions of human development is analyzed with respect to both weak and...

This article reviews existing linkages between the two broad concepts of human development and sustainability and discusses ways in which the often separate literatures can learn from each other. It proposes a practical way in which the measurements of human development and sustainability can be...