Thousands of New York businesses are in debt with little hope of survival

Lack of New York City commercial tenants\u27 rights and protections, and government inaction, means small business owners are facing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of debt due to COVID-19 closures. Link: http://project3482486.tilda.ws

Justice derailed : the uncertain fate of Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic

Over time, the Dominican Republic formalized a more restrictive definition of citizenship by birth. By expanding the interpretation of what it means to be “in transit,” the Dominican Republic began to chip away at its jus soli (right of soil) regime. Given the long history of migration from Haiti to the Dominican Republic and demographic realities, this shift has had a disproportionate impact on individuals of Haitian descent. The redefinition of the jus soli basis for citizenship reached its peak in the now infamous sentence of the Constitutional Tribunal of the Dominican Republic, 168-13. In September 2013, the Constitutional Tribunal issued Sentence 168-13, which retroactively denationalized and effectively rendered stateless many Dominicans of Haitian descent by establishing that children born in the Dominican Republic to those illegally residing in the country were not entitled to citizenship by birth, as their parents were considered to be “in transit.” The Sentence further called for a national regularization plan. In an effort to implement Sentence 168-13, the Dominican government established the National Plan for the Regularization of Foreigners (PNRE). The PNRE is a plan to regularize the status of undocumented migrants in the Dominican Republic, which most notably impacts Haitian migrants. Following international backlash over Sentence 168-13, Dominican Republic President Danilo Medina issued Law 169-14 (Naturalization Law), which provides a pathway to naturalization for those effectively left stateless by the Sentence. This report will detail the problems in the implementation of the PNRE and the Naturalization Law, how various actors were involved in or impacted by the regularization and naturalization processes, and finally, will outline the constraints that may inhibit the work of policy makers and human rights defenders in addressing immigration and citizenship issues going forward

Institutional investors’ allocation to emerging markets: A panel approach to asset demand.

This study assesses the factors driving insurance companies and pension funds’ portfolio allocation to\ud emerging market assets. By making use of the Emerging Portfolio Fund Research database, it estimates asset\ud demand equations for emerging markets’ equities and bonds for insurance companies and pension funds\ud from advanced countries. These are estimated by using recent advances in the literature on panel autoregressive\ud distributed lag models. Two key results emerge: firstly, consistent with ‘search for yield’ investment\ud behaviour, weaker balance sheet conditions, measured by the lower funding level of pension funds, positively\ud affect the asset allocation to emerging markets. Secondly, the accumulation of reserves by emerging\ud markets is a significant attractor of foreign institutional investment

The Effects of the Gender of Children on Expenditure Patterns in Rural China: A Semiparametric Analysis

We analyze expenditure patterns for rural China, focusing on differences between families with boys and girls. The sample includes more than 5000 nuclear families from nineteen Chinese provinces. Following the existing literature, we estimate Engel curves for food and for alcohol, a typical adult good. We use a flexible partially linear specification and allow for endogeneity of total expenditures. The results are similar to those of other studies, not providing much evidence of gender differentials. We then focus on the decision to send a child to school and on the budget share spent on educational goods. Using both parametric and semiparametric estimates, we find evidence that boys are more often sent to school and that expenditures on a boy that goes to school are larger than for a school–going girl of the same age