New working paper "Institutions and Visa Regimes"

New working paper "Institutions and Visa Regimes" by Camila Gracheva, Leonid Polishchuk, Koen Schoors, and Alexander Yarkin.

Abstract     

We study the impact on visa restrictions of institutions and social norms in a sending country. To this purpose, we unbundle institutions into “institutions-services”, which complement productive activities and serve as public production inputs, and “institutions-rules”, which strengthen the rule of law and constrain unproductive behavior. We propose a theoretical model which incorporates spillover effects of domestic institutional changes and shows that while stronger institutions-services reduce visa barriers, stronger institutions-rules have the opposite effect. Furthermore, visa barriers are affected by norms and values, which complement formal institutions as factors of visa regimes. We use various empirical models to test and confirm the above conjectures.

Gracheva, Camila and Polishchuk, Leonid and Schoors, Koen J. L. and Yarkin, Alexander M., Institutions and Visa Regimes (December 10, 2015). Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. WP BRP 114/EC/2015. Available at SSRN