Remittances and incumbency: Theory and evidence

By raising household income, remittances lower the marginal utility of targeted electoral transfers, thus weakening the efficacy of vote buying. Yet, remittances make individuals wealthier and believe the national economy is performing well, which is positively attributed to the incumbent. Building on these insights, I show that the confluence of these divergent channels generate a surprising result that at increasingly higher levels of dissatisfaction with the incumbent, a remittance recipient is more likely to vote for the incumbent than a non‐remittance recipient. These predictions and their underlying mechanisms are substantiated across 18 Latin American countries.     

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION: A CASE AGAINST BUILDING EVER‐HIGHER FENCES

International migration, seen as a powerful force of truly global character that is shaping today's socio‐economic reality, is a highly controversial and politicised issue. This paper explores its ramifications in the context of a growing backlash against immigration across the rich world. Specifically, it argues that the free flow of people – like the free movement of goods and capital – is beneficial to developed and developing economies alike and, in doing so, shows how migration produces win–win outcomes. Thus the study, while admitting that inflows of foreign‐born workers pose challenges and entail trade‐offs, makes a case for the liberalisation of immigration policies. The paper deepens our understanding of the issues at hand and constitutes a voice in favour of liberal‐policy choices.     

Crowdfrauding: Avoiding Ponzi entrepreneurs when investing in new ventures

Crowdfunding has gained substantial interest in the U.S., allowing entrepreneurs to raise startup capital in exchange for equity in their ventures. This approach to equity capital can open up new sources of venture finance to legitimate entrepreneurs, but little attention has been given to how it offers new opportunities for illegal entrepreneurs to defraud investors. We adopt a forensic approach to examine entrepreneurs who launch Ponzi ventures—businesses that continually bring in new investors in order to use their money to pay returns to earlier investors—to demonstrate the ease, creativity, and audacity with which these illegal entrepreneurs operate. The provided examples of Ponzi entrepreneurs show how easily they can circumvent the safeguards purported to protect investors: screening by ‘the crowd,’ transparency and documentation requirements, independent audit reports, and withholding of funds until the venture's financial goal has been met. In this article, we offer possible solutions to help protect investors, legitimate entrepreneurs, and business in general from the damage created by illegal entrepreneurs.     

Is a Policy of Free Movement of Workers Sustainable?

In this paper, we study the costs and benefits of the adoption of a policy of free movement of workers. For countries to agree on uncontrolled movements of workers, short‐run costs must be outweighed by the long‐term benefits of better labor‐market flexibility and income smoothing. We show that such a policy is less likely to be adopted when workers are more impatient and less risk‐averse, when production technologies display stronger decreasing returns, and when countries trade a significant share of their products.     

International aid from the recipient perspective: public or private good input assistance?

This article proposes a theoretical model from the recipient perspective that considers what type of assistance a donor country should provide: public good assistance or private good assistance. We investigate the effects of migration and free riders under both types of assistance. We empirically apply this model to the rapidly growing economies and a large official development assistance disbursement for East Asia.     

A Link Between Workers' Remittances and Business Cycles in Germany and Turkey

This paper examines the cyclical interactions between the remittances of Turkish workers in Germany and output in both Turkey and Germany. Our analysis introduces a new data set covering 1962 to 2004, never used before in the research literature and considered to be a more reliable source than the data sets used in other studies. By dividing the original sample into recruitment, family reunification, and naturalization periods, we show that the duration of migrants' stay in the host country affects the direction and strength of the relation between remittances and the host and home countries' business cycles.     

农村剩余劳动力迁移的充要条件分析——基于预期收入成本理论

笔者结合收益成本理论及托达罗模型,在对农民预期迁移收益和成本分析的基础上,通过调研数据,分别对就地和异地两种迁移方式以及迁移前后的收益进行对比分析。结论显示:第一,农村剩余劳动力就地迁移和异地迁移的最低期望月薪差值远远大于异地迁移成本;第二,农民对就地迁移和异地迁移的最低期望月收入分别是农民在农村剔除务工收入后人均月收入的3.42倍和4.80倍,这两个比例数值即是本文寻求的焦点——农村剩余劳动力迁移的充要条件,并且该比例数值可能会随着不同地区农村经济水平的提高而减小。