COVID-19 monetary transfer in El Salvador: determining factors

Given the lack of governmental guidelines, this paper identifies and analyzes the statistical determinants associated with receiving the onetime monetary transfer in El Salvador ($300 dollars) as an economic measure to face the COVID-19 pandemic. A logistic regression was implemented (whether received the transfer or not) based on a probabilistic sample (n=1222) of surveyed people throughout the country. Independent variables were selected drawing upon key characteristics employed internationally in monetary transfers: age, gender, rural area, employment, family income, and education. The text identifies a statistically significant and negative relation between receiving the monetary transfer and two variables: family income and educational level. The need to increase coverage of the program is addressed as well as the importance of considering age, gender, rural areas, and employment as criteria for selecting the beneficiaries in such economic measures.

Host States’ Monetary Sovereignty Within the Construct of Bilateral Investment Treaties

This article considers assertions of the diminution of the monetary sovereignty of host states when they sign bilateral investment treaties. It discusses monetary transfer provisions in the model BITs of South Africa and Egypt and how their construction can affect states’ rights to regulatory autonomy in mitigating financial crises. This has become imperative in light of recent discussions on the possibilities for a systemic overhaul of BIT provisions, by pushing back against the diminution of host states’ sovereignty in order to respond to the force of globalization. Achieving this would require reform of existing model BITs to introduce appropriate exceptions in order to ensure policy space to protect the public interest.

Labor Supply, Taxation, and the Use of Tax Revenues: A Real-Effort Experiment in Canada, France, and Germany

We experimentally investigated three variants of a real-effort game with taxation that differed in the degree of redistribution of tax revenue. Concretely, we compared a Leviathan scenario, where no tax is redistributed, with a situation where tax revenues are used to finance a public good involving neither a direct nor immediate monetary transfer to participants and with a scenario where direct transfer payments are made to each participant. Our results confirm previous findings of a nonlinear decreasing relationship between tax rate and work effort. We found that, for tax rates above 50 percent, the level of effort was highest under direct redistribution, followed by the public-good scenario, and by the Leviathan case. Conducting the experiment in Canada, France, and Germany, we observed average effort (and thus tax revenues) to be higher in France than in Canada and Germany.

Exogenous testosterone increases the audience effect in healthy males: evidence for the social status hypothesis

Several studies have implicated testosterone in the modulation of altruistic behaviours instrumental to advancing social status. Independent studies have also shown that people tend to behave more altruistically when being watched (i.e. audience effect). To date, little is known about whether testosterone could modulate the audience effect. In the current study, we tested the effect of testosterone on altruistic behaviour using a donation task, wherein participants were asked to either accept or reject a monetary transfer to a charity organization accompanying a personal cost either in the presence or absence of an observer. We administered testosterone gel or placebo to healthy young men ( n = 140) in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, mixed design. Our results showed that participants were more likely to accept the monetary transfer to the charity when being observed compared to when they completed the task alone. More importantly, this audience effect was amplified among people receiving testosterone versus placebo. Our findings suggest that testosterone administration increases the audience effect and further buttress the social status hypothesis, according to which testosterone promotes status-seeking behaviour in a context-dependent manner.

On the Pacific Salmon Treaty*

This paper studies the optimal design of the Pacific Salmon Treaty, which was signed by the U.S. and Canada in 1999 to share salmon on the Pacific coast. Moral hazard exists because countries may steal from each other. If a country’s observed output is suspiciously too high, the treaty either reduces the country’s future share, or asks the country to make a monetary transfer to its opponent. A calibrated version of our model shows that it is optimal for the U.S. to pay Canada $328.93 million every 30.78 years. Switching to the optimal contract improves the total welfare by 1.55%.

India’s BITs

Continuing on the discussion on the key features of Indian BITs from the previous chapter, this chapter studies the following provisions in India’s BITs and FTA investment chapters: expropriation; monetary transfer provisions; general exception clauses; and the investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions. Like chapter 4, this chapter will also discuss these provisions against the background of ISDS jurisprudence that has emerged on these four issues. The chapter demonstrates that these provisions in many treaties are worded broadly and the determination of the content is subject to arbitral discretion. These broadly worded treaty provisions, subject to arbitral discretion, fail to balance investment protection and host state’s right to regulate. India was primarily a ‘rule taker’ in international investment law because most of these provisions in Indian BITs are borrowed from the BITs of ‘capital exporting’ countries that followed the laissez faire liberalism model.

The 2016 Indian Model BIT

This chapter studies India’s 2016 Model BIT, which the Indian government claims aims to balance investment protection with the state’s right to regulate. The chapter shows that barring some of the provisions like full protection and security and monetary transfer provisions, the Model BIT has not succeeded in reconciling the interests of foreign investors with the state’s right to regulate. The Model BIT contains a narrow definition of investment; an extremely narrow FET-type provision; excludes MFN clause and taxation measures from the purview of the BIT. Furthermore, the expropriation provision in the Model BIT blurs the line between lawful and unlawful expropriation; and provides a complicated and sequential ISDS making it extremely difficult for a foreign investor to make effective use of it. Furthermore, although the attempt of the Model BIT is to reduce arbitral discretion, many provisions still remain undefined and vague, thereby continuing to grant significant discretion to ISDS arbitral tribunals.

A Pseudo-Market Approach to Allocation with Priorities

We propose a pseudo-market mechanism for no-monetary-transfer allocation of indivisible objects based on priorities such as those in school choice. Agents are given token money, face priority-specific prices, and buy utility-maximizing random assignments. The mechanism is asymptotically incentive compatible, and the resulting assignments are fair and constrained Pareto efficient. Hylland and Zeckhauser’s (1979) position-allocation problem is a special case of our framework, and our results on incentives and fairness are also new in their classical setting. (JEL D63, D82, H75, I21, I28)