1. Lebanon has one of the highest public debt stocks (relative to GDP) in the world, currently at over 185 percent of 2003 GDP. Economic policy continues to be dominated by chronic imbalances in government finances which have seen the budget deficit average over 17 percent of GDP over the past...

In this paper, we evaluate four explanations for economic stagnation that have been proposed in the literature: coordination failures, ineffective mix of occupational choices, insufficient human capital accumulation, and politico-economic considerations. We calibrate models that embody these...

This paper presents empirical evidence regarding the effect of simultaneous antitrust and trade policy on productivity. We find that treating antitrust across countries as an exogenous policy overestimates the impact of competition on productivity by as much as 18%.