Using a large, original database of 385 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in Egypt, we document for the first time the negative impact of cronyism on economic growth. In the early 2000s, a policy shift in Egypt led to the expansion of crony activities into new, previously...

The study has surveyed the post-Arab Spring youth employment policies that have been adopted in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Tunisia. In addition, the study examines whether and how the economic policies implemented in these countries led to high levels of youth unemployment prior to the Arab...

We analyze the economic impacts of floods using new data on 3,184 large flood events in 118 countries between 1985 and 2008. We use panel vector auto-regressions to trace the dynamic response of output to three types of flood shocks. Our results robustly indicate that flood shocks tend to have a...