Cultural differences play an important role in shaping migration patterns. The conventional proxies for cross country cultural differences - such as common language, ethnicity, genetic traits or religion - implicitly assume that cultural proximity between two countries is constant over time and...

How does international trade affect the popularity of governments and leaders? The recent backlash against globalization renders this question extremely topical. Yet, most previous work has looked for political effects of aggregate trade flows without decomposing into particular types of...

This paper focuses on how gender segmentation in labor markets shapes the local effects of international trade. We first develop a theoretical framework that embeds trade and gender-segmented labor markets to show that foreign demand shocks may either increase or decrease the female-to-male...

In theory, one of the main benefits of financial globalization is that it should allow for more efficient international risk sharing. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the patterns of risk sharing among different groups of countries and examine how international...

"Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of "official" GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing...

Our objective is to analyse the role of teacher and school quality to explain differences in students' educational outcomes. With this aim, we use PISA microdata for 10 middle income and 2 high income countries and we apply decomposition methods in order to identify the role of these factors for...