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Publications (55)
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Cross-border traders face a choice between official and unofficial border crossings. The latter allow them to evade taxes, but expose them to other risks, such as bribes, fines, and arrest. We investigate the perceptions of cross-border traders about the risks of trading officially vs unofficially...
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The documented under-representation of marginalized groups in business ownership and the labour market is a concerning issue. This study explores how caste disparities in small-firm entrepreneurship impact on firm performance in India, focusing on the informal sector. Our examination shows a...
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– Relative and absolute perspectives
This paper presents the first global and regional estimates of polarization and bipolarization spanning the period 1960–2020. The study relies on group data to implement a flexible parametric model to obtain the global income distribution and polarization estimates. The study introduces a battery of...
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– Evidence from Zambian tax administrative data
We investigate the behavioural responses of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates applying empirical bunching methodology to tax administrative data from Zambia over the period from 2014 to 2021. We find evidence for excess bunching at the first kink in the tax...
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Two well established stylized facts of economic development are a strong correlation between investment and income, and large differences in investment rates across countries. Construction is the largest component of investment. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in construction...
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Monitoring health is key for identifying priorities in public health planning and improving healthcare services. Life expectancy has conventionally been regarded as a valuable indicator to compare the health status of different populations. However, this measure is simply the mean of the...
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This paper seeks to understand whether the way in which inequality is communicated through measurements influences individuals’ fairness perceptions regarding wealth inequality. It begins from the premise that prominent measures of inequality, such as the Gini coefficient, fall short of providing an...
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– A k-means approach
This paper employs k-means clustering, a multidimensional pattern recognition method, to categorize countries using information from five Varieties of Democracy indices. K-means country clusters are similar but not entirely identical to both k-medians clusters and arbitrary groups formed using only...
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Financial sanctions, which aim to economically hurt a target by restricting its access to financial assets and markets, require the ability to identify who owns an asset. Although experts have long claimed that offshore financial centres that offer secrecy (‘tax havens’) undermine sanctions by...
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– An interpretative survey
When India became a republic in 1950, the economy was primarily agrarian, with three-fifths of output originating from agriculture. In the sixty years since independence, there has been a significant transformation of economic activity away from agriculture, with less than one-fifth of output now...
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– Examining the impact of relative income on formal and informal debt in South Africa
How does income inequality impact the propensity for and levels of formal and informal household debt? This paper assesses this question using the two most recent waves of the South African Living Conditions Survey. A range of linear models as well as a zero-inflated Poisson model are employed, and...
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This paper examines how trade sanctions affect the allocation of workers across formal and informal employment. We analyse the case of the unexpected and unprecedented trade sanctions imposed on Iran in 2012. We use a difference-in-differences approach and compare the probability of working in the...
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The United Kingdom’s (UK) property markets are thought to be a common destination for corrupt and criminal assets and money laundering, with investment often through offshore shell companies. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we study the impact of the introduction of a policy in...
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– A general equilibrium analysis
The structure employed is a small open economy, with one city and a rural hinterland, two traded goods, a transport sector, two specific factors, and mobile labour. A socially profitable programme will promote not only internal, but also external trade. Theory and numerical examples indicate that...
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In an environment with extensive corruption where much of the population evades paying their full taxes due, we tackle the question of optimal taxation when constituencies with opposing objectives (the poor and the rich) push tax policy in different directions. We think in terms of a government...
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We study whether misinvoicing in international trade is reflected in cross-border bank accounts as reported by offshore financial centres. We show that residents hold more offshore wealth when local misinvoicing practices thrive, especially for under-invoiced exports of natural resources. These...
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