This paper examines financial spillovers between the four largest equity markets (by market capitalization) in the GCC region using a VAR-GARCH (1,1) framework that sheds light on interdependence as well as the effects of the 2014 oil crisis. Since the UAE is a federation including two stock...

Conventional wisdom in economics holds that traditional credit and insurance networks are inapt for insuring against covariate risks such as natural hazards. We challenge this claim by examining changes in financial allocations in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (Roscas), a popular...

This paper offers a meta-regression analysis of the literature on the drivers of financial development. Our results based on 1900 estimates suggest that institutional quality is positively correlated to both private sector credit and stock market capitalization (both as share of GDP). Domestic...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

This paper studies financial service provision booked through offshore financial centers (OFCs). Based on several novel data sources and recent advances in event study methodology, I exploit the natural experiment of re-occurring hurricanes hitting small islands and compare local reactions to...

Using a new data set on Swiss state and local governments from 1890 to today, we analyze how the adoption of proportional representation affects fiscal policy. We show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (e.g. education and welfare benefits) but decrease spending on...

World trade evolves at two margins. Where a bilateral trading relationship already exists it may increase through time (intensive margin). But trade may also increase if a trading bilateral relationship is newly established between countries that have not traded with each other in the past...

In this paper we test the well-known hypothesis of Obstfeld and Rogoff (2000) that trade costs are the key to explaining the so-called Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Using a gravity framework in an intertemporal context, we provide strong support for the hypothesis and we reconcile our results with...

Epidemiological models assume gravity-like interactions of individuals across space without microfoundations. We combine a simple epidemiological frame-work with a dynamic model of individual location choice. The model predicts that flows of people across space obey a structural gravity...

Gravity as both fact and theory is one of the great success stories of recent research on international trade, and has featured prominently in the policy debate over Brexit. We first review the facts, noting the overwhelming evidence that trade tends to fall with distance. We then introduce some...