An inter-governmental body is encouraging the replacement of currency with the objective of discouraging illegal economic activities. This policy is analyzed in a searchtheoretic model where individuals choose legal or illegal production, settle trades via monetary or costly intermediated exchange, and where the government imperfectly monitors monetary transactions. Stationary monetary equilibr...

Economic models of trade in endangered species products often do not incorporate four focal arguments in the policy debate over trade bans: 1) Law-abiding consumers may operate in another market, separate from illegal consumers, that trade would bring online. 2) Legal trade reduces stigma, which affects demand of law-abiding consumers. 3) Laundering may bring illegal goods to legal markets when...

Legal and illegal immigrants are concentrated in U.S. border states. This paper asks to what extent geographic clustering is attributable to differences in state-provided public aid. California has been shown to have a disproportionate number of legal immigrant welfare users, but little evidence exists concerning illegal persons. Illegal immigrants may collect welfare benefits on behalf of lega...

From Illegal to Legal: Estimating Previous Illegal Experience among New Legal Immigrants to the United States This paper develops a framework for estimating previous illegal experience among annual cohorts of new legal immigrants to the United States – using public-use administrative microdata alone, survey data alone, and the two jointly – and provides estimates for the FY 1996 cohort of new i...

There are no uniform protocols in the United States for safe, environmentally acceptable disposal of controlled substances by patients. In addition, there are conflicting protocols used by various institutions for the disposal of narcotic medications. Although the US Drug Enforcement Administration oversees the prescribing, acquisition, and distribution of controlled substances and works to pre...

BACKGROUND Little research has been done to examine whether smokers switch to illegal or roll-your-own (RYO) cigarettes in response to a change in their relative price. OBJECTIVE This paper explores how relative prices between three cigarette forms (manufactured legal, manufactured illegal and RYO cigarettes) are associated with the choice of one form over another after controlling for covari...

The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of digital music consumers on the Internet. Using clickstream data on a panel of more than 16,000 European consumers, we estimate the effects of illegal downloading and legal streaming on the legal purchases of digital music. Our results suggest that Internet users do not view illegal downloading as a substitute to legal digital music. Although ...

Illegal hunting of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) for ivory is causing rapid declines in their populations. Since 2007, illegal ivory trade has more than doubled. African elephants are facing the most serious conservation crisis since 1989, when international trade was banned. One solution proposed is establishment of a controlled legal trade in ivory. High prices for ivory mean that th...

This paper studies the differences in earnings between Mexican legal and illegal immigrants in the U.S. The analysis includes a cross-sectional examination of the wage differences between legal and undocumented workers as well as a longitudinal analysis examining the impact of legalization on the earnings of previously-undocumented workers. It is shown that the average hourly wage rate of male ...