This paper discusses the recent literature on the role of the state in economic development. It concludes that government incentives to enact sound policies are key to economic success. It also discusses the evidence on what happens after episodes of economic and political liberalizations,...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

Large and sustained differences in marginal products of capital (MPKs) across countries are sharply at odds with the core implications of the neoclassical framework. Lucas (1990) and many subsequent studies have examined reasons for this MPK differential. In a recent contribution, Caselli and...

This paper investigates the economic fortunes of coerced vs. free workers in a global supply chain. To identify the differential treatment of otherwise similar workers we resort to a unique exogenous labor demand shock that affects wages in voluntary and involuntary labor relations differently....

We use survey evidence on reported spending in hypothetical energy price shock scenarios to study novel features of the price elasticity of energy demand and the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) after paying the energy bill. We find that the price elasticity is significantly larger for price...

We estimate the size and trend of the Egyptian shadow economy using two of the most common methods: the currency demand approach and the structural equation MIMIC model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study to estimate the size of the shadow economy in Egypt during...

We construct a dynamic model of a small open economy to analyze the effects of large energy subsidies. The model includes domestic energy production and consumption, trade in energy at world market prices, as well as private and public sector production. The model is calibrated to Egypt and used...

We study the effect of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath on migration intentions of the Egyptian youth. We measure revolution intensity using the spacial variation in the number of deaths during the revolution from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution Wikithawra and...

This paper investigates the key factors affecting household energy expenditure in Egypt. Based upon the latest 2015 Egyptian HIECS Survey, we develop a quantile regression model with an innovative variable selection approach via Adaptive Lasso Regularization technique to untangle the spectrum of...

This study examines the economic globalization and the shadow economy nexus in Egypt. Using time series data from 1976 to 2013, the impulse response analysis shows that the response of the shadow economy in Egypt to positive shocks in economic globalization is negative and statistically...