International investment agreements in bilateral treaties or free trade agreements allow investors to bring compensation claims when their investments are hurt by new regulations addressing environmental or other social concerns. Compensation rules such as expropriation clauses in international treaties help solve post-investment moral hazard problems such as hold-ups, thereby helping to prevent inefficient over-regulation and...

Comparing the labour market returns to numeracy and cognitive ability in Indonesia and the United States, this paper argues that different economic characteristics between developing and developed countries may require workers with different skills. Different economic characteristics between developing and developed countries may require workers with different skills, resulting in different returns to the same...

This paper measures the evolution of the gender differences in numeracy among school age children using a longitudinal dataset from Indonesia. A unique feature of the dataset is that it uses an identical test for two survey rounds, which implies that any changes in the gender gap are caused by actual changes in numeracy. To...

This paper shows that the proposed reforms would consolidate the existing family tax system, which clearly fails in terms of both fairness and disincentives. In the early 1980’s Australia had a highly progressive individual income tax and universal family payments. The paper proposes a return to a strongly progressive individual based income tax and universal...

This paper compares the tax systems of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US, and summarizes the evidence about top income shares.