The Finance-Growth Nexus is a classical source of debate among economists. This contribution offers regional evidence on this issue in order to see if it can meet the data within a 140 years old economic union -- Italy -, in the ideal context for its main competitor - New Economic Geography -...

The built environment has been identified as one of the cost effective platforms for reducing energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. With policies and the know-how in existence, the real estate sector has already adopted measures such as building codes and energy efficiency labels to drive...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their empirical approach must produce insignificant...

Apart from altruistic reasons, NGOs may engage in developing countries under conditions of conflict and war in order to secure funding and survive in the ‘market’ of humanitarian relief and development assistance. Applying a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we analyze...

Human trafficking is a humanitarian problem of global scale, but quantitative research on the issue barely exists. This paper is a first attempt to explore the economic drivers of human trafficking and migrant exploitation using micro data. We argue that migration pressure combined with informal...

Diversification into non-agricultural activities in rural areas can be broadly classified as either survival-led or opportunity-led. The existence of these two types of non-agricultural activities implies a U-shaped relationship between the share of income derived from non-agricultural...

Corruption has fierce impacts on economic and societal development and is subject to a vast range of institutional, jurisdictional, societal and economic conditions. Research indicates that corruption's predominantly negative effects have arisen to a massive trans-border threat while creating...

Differential tax analysis is used to show how the socially optimal fiscal-tax to liquidity-tax ratio changes with the relative size of the tax-evading hidden economy. The smaller the relative size of the hidden economy, the larger the optimal fiscal-tax to liquidity-tax ratio. The empirical...

Employing a unique dataset that covers almost 6000 informal enterprises from six West African urban centers, this paper examines the backward and forward linkages of these enterprises to the formal sector. We first provide a descriptive analysis of the existing formal-informal linkages. It turns...

Human trafficking is a humanitarian problem of global scale, but quantitative research on the issue barely exists. This paper is a first attempt to explore the economic drivers of human trafficking and migrant exploitation using micro data. We argue that migration pressure combined with informal...