Building on the idea that religious communities provide mutual insurance against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious membership is more valuable in societies exposed to greater common risk. In our empirical analysis we exploit rainfall risk as a source of common economic risk in...

We show that, when there is joint production of an agricultural good and rural amenities, the first-best allocation of resources can be implemented with a tax on the agricultural good and some subsidies on the production factors (land and labour). The use of a subsidy on the agricultural good...

Using multivariate unit root test methods, this Paper investigates the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis at the sectoral level across six European countries over the last seventeen years. Evidence of mean reversion toward PPP is found for the relative prices of some sectors and countries....

This paper provides further evidence on the recent increase in international consumption risk sharing. We show that this increase is more pronounced among EU and EMU countries than among non-E(M)U industrialised countries. We also show that the patterns of international but not intra-European...

This paper proposes an explanation of the puzzling coexistence of elements of inertia and dynamism on the Russian labour market using a segmentation model. Risk averse workers are differentiated according to their productivity. They face a trade-off between wages and access to social services...

Convergence concerns poor economies catching up with rich ones. At issue is what happens to the cross-sectional distribution of economies, not whether a single economy tends towards its own steady state. It is the latter, however, that has preoccupied the traditional approach to convergence...

This article summarizes our views on the role of an 'aggregation bias' in explaining the PPP Puzzle, in response to the several papers recently written in reaction to our initial contribution. We discuss in particular the criticisms of Imbs, Mumtaz, Ravn and Rey (2002) presented in Chen and...

This paper produces estimates of regional redistribution and stabilization through the central government budget in Canada, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. The estimates rest on panel data econometrics and an adherence to certain accounting principles that have occasionally...

We analyse the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a family headed by a single mother. Growing up in a non-intact family in Germany is associated with worse outcomes in models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and...