Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin Recent documents in Mohammad Amin en-us Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:18:09 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/16 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/16 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:58:03 PST Existing studies aimed at identifying individuals or economic agents that suffer more from crime than others are based on the incidence of crime or the proportion of agents within a group that experience one or more incident of crime during a given period of time. This paper shows that studies based solely on the incidence of crime may provide a misleading picture as to who suffers more from crime. In a sample of about 6,000 manufacturing firms in 14 Latin American countries, we find that large firms are more likely to experience an incident of crime than the small firms in a given year. However, the burden of crime measured by losses due to crime as a percentage of firms' annual sales is heavier on the smaller firms. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/15 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/15 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:56:09 PST Some informal businesses are started to take advantage of business opportunities (opportunity firms) while others are started because the owner cannot find a satisfactory job (necessity firms). Comparing opportunity vs. necessity informal firms, this note finds that opportunity firms are more efficient and larger. They are also more likely to use external finance, and suffer less from infrastructure bottlenecks such as power outages. Further, obstacles to registering as perceived by the firms are much less severe for opportunity firms. The key point in all these differences is that they apply to the manufacturing sector alone. With the exception of having more educated managers, opportunity and necessity firms in the service sector are not too different. In short, the motivation for starting a business matters for informal manufacturing but not much for service firms. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/14 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/14 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:52:12 PST A comparison of service and manufacturing firms in the informal sector shows that service firms are larger in terms of total sales and also generate more output per worker. They rely less on physical infrastructure and machines but more on human capital. Service firms also appear to be better integrated with the financial system with access to finance being less of an obstacle to their business. Some of the commonly held reasons for not registering such as taxes that registered businesses have to pay and benefits from registering such as better access to government programs appear to be less important to service than manufacturing firms. Last, there are important country specific differences between service and manufacturing businesses in, for example, female ownership and the motivation for starting the business. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/13 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/13 Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:56:46 PDT About 20 percent of the firms in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region are victims of crime during a year. While losses to firms due to crime incidents average 0.48 percent of a firm's annual sales, expenses by firms on security average 1.42 percent of their annual sales. These two costs equaling 1.9 percent of annual sales of a firm are about 8 times what firms spend on R&D and 1.8 times the reported amount paid in bribery. Surprisingly, rich countries do not score over poor ones on crime related problems. Last, while large firms are more likely to be victims of crime than the small firms, losses from crime are much heavier on the smaller firms. Other characteristics of a firm do not matter much for the extent of crime it faces with the exception of the industry to which it belongs and whether it innovates or not. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/12 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/12 Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:58:28 PDT Drawing on a small but growing literature, this note argues that consumer behavior may be as important as firm behavior for the level of competition in consumer industries such as retailing. We use data on 1.948 retail stores in India and contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we find that the number of non-workers in the household, a proxy for time cost of shopping, has a large effect on competition. Moving from the city with the least to the most number of non-workers increases competition by 84% of its mean level. Second, as suggested in the literature, we find that moving from the richest to the poorest city increases competition by 50% of its mean level. However, much of this effect is due to more non-workers in the poorer cities rather than any independent effect of income. Third, we report on a number of interesting and somewhat surprising findings on the level of competition in India relative to other countries, how it varies across small vs. large stores and metropolitan vs. non-metropolitan cities. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/11 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/11 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:11:21 PDT Existing studies on crime are exclusively focused on crime against individuals and households. These studies show that crime is more rampant in the larger cities and against the relatively well off agents. Using Enterprise Surveys data for 14 Latin American countries we find that one third of the firms suffer from one or more incident of crime annually which is roughly similar to the available estimate of 38.6% for households. Crime related losses average 2.7% of annual sales for all firms in the sample which is more than the reported amount of bribery, losses due to power outages and firms' expenditure on R&D. We also find that the relatively well off large firms are more likely to be victims of crime than the small firms but losses due to crime as a percentage of annual sales are bigger for small firms. In short, crime in the region is regressive. Last, larger cities are more prone to crime than the smaller cities. However, this holds only across cities within countries but not across countries. That is, what matters for crime is the relative size of a city within a country but its absolute size is irrelevant. We argue that this distinction is important for understanding the dynamics of crime and for the optimal design of crime prevention policies. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/10 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/10 Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:19:40 PDT A large literature shows that common law countries perform better than civil law countries along various dimensions of the institutional environment. The present paper contributes to this literature by showing that a similar result holds for another measure of institutional quality. That is, the ease with which information on rules and regulations is available to firms is much higher in common law compared with civil law countries. Roughly, one-third of this difference can be explained by differences in the level of business regulations across the two legal traditions. We provide some plausible reasons for these findings. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/9 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/9 Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:58:57 PDT We use a sample of 133 countries to investigate the link between the abundance of natural resources and micro-economic reforms. Previous studies suggest that natural resource abundance gives rise to governments that are less accountable to the public, states that are oligarchic, and that it leads to the erosion of social capital. These factors are likely to hamper economic reforms. We test this hypothesis using data on micro-economic reforms from the World Bank's Doing Business database. The results provide a robust support for the "resource curse" view: a move from the 75th percentile to the 25th percentile on resource abundance equals 10.9 percentage points more reform, a large effect given that the mean probability of reform in the sample is 57.1%. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/8 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/8 Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:42:03 PST The paper analyzes migration from Zambia in order to understand how migration policy can support development in the least developed countries. Overall emigration from Zambia is not high by regional standards but the pattern of migration is skewed towards the skilled and away from the unskilled. A development-friendly approach to migration for Zambia would strive to ensure the temporariness of both types of movement. First, because industrial countries may be willing to accept a higher level of unskilled immigration if they could be certain that it was temporary. Secondly, because any adverse effects of brain drain would be greatly alleviated if skilled emigration was temporary. The problem is that host countries cannot unilaterally ensure temporariness of unskilled migration because repatriation cannot be accomplished without the help of source countries like Zambia, and source countries today have little incentive to facilitate the return of the unskilled. At the same time, source countries like Zambia cannot unilaterally ensure temporariness of the skilled because repatriation cannot be accomplished without the help of the host countries, and host countries currently have little incentive to send back the skilled. Hence, there is a strong case and considerable scope for cooperation between source countries like Zambia and destination countries in the design and implementation of migration policy so that unskilled migration becomes feasible and skilled migration takes a more desirable form. Mohammad Amin http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/7 http://works.bepress.com/mohammad_amin/7 Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:33:51 PST This paper takes another look at the extent of business regulation in civil law versus common law countries. In contrast to existing studies that find a heavier role of government in the civil law countries, we show that this holds only for a subset of civil and common law countries that have well developed political institutions but not otherwise. In short, it is the interaction between legal origin and the quality of political institutions and not legal origin alone that can explain differences in the level of regulation across countries. For example, focusing on entry regulations, our results show that the number of procedures required to start a business are lower in common law compared with civil law countries by 2.5 procedures or 24.3% of the sample mean. However, this difference varies sharply across the sample of countries with high and low levels of political accountability. It equals a large 3.4 procedures (37% of the sample mean) for the former and a mere 1.1 procedures (9.7% of the sample mean) for the latter. We provide plausible explanations for these findings based on recent contributions to the literature on political and legal institutions. Mohammad Amin