This paper examines whether the federal structure of aid-receiving countries matters in explaining aid effectiveness. Following the decentralization theorem, the devolution of powers should increase aid effectiveness, since local decision-makers are better informed about local needs. At the same...

Using a new daily dataset for all stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange between 1905 and 1910, we study the impact of information asymmetry during the liquidity freeze and market run of October 1907 - one of the most severe financial crises of the 20th century. We estimate that the market...

The Italian civil war and the Nazi occupation of Italy occurred at a critical juncture, just before the birth of a new democracy. We study the impact of these traumatic events by exploiting geographic heterogeneity in the duration and intensity of civil war, and the persistence of the...

Economic development is often held to be beneficial for gender equality. However, there is good reason to believe that long lasting institutions like religion, legal traditions, and family practices, also matter. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the relative importance of...

We propose a development-compatible refunding system designed to mitigate climate change. Industrial countries pay an initial fee into a global fund. Each country chooses its national carbon tax. Part of the global fund is refunded to developing and industrial countries, in proportion to the...

The need to absorb windfalls gains and manage them appropriately has been discussed extensively by academics and policy makers alike. We explore the role of the financial sector in intermediating these windfalls. Controlling for the level of financial development, inflation, GDP growth and...

The physical or absolute geography of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is often blamed for its poor economic performance. A country's location however not only determines its absolute geography, it also pins down its relative position on the globe vis-a-vis other countries. This paper assesses the...

This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to fathers) increases expenditures on children. From this, should we infer that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? In this paper, we develop a non-cooperative model of household decision making to...