As both speculative and hedging financial flows into commodity futures are expected to link commodity price formation more strongly to equity indices, we investigate whether these processes also create increased correlation amongst the commodities themselves. Considering U.S. oil and gas...

Why are there areas with persistenly low levels of income or consumption? This could result from the concentration of households with a low capital endowment or from variations in households’ environment. Peru is a country with a very much fragmented topography and climate, that combines dry...

This paper assesses the impact of a free means-tested complementary health insurance on doctor visits. In order to tackle the endogeneity issue of the complementary health insurance variable, we use information on the selection rule to qualify for the free plan and adopt a regression...

In order to assess the growth implications of policy complementarities, this paper applies second-best results to reform indicators. During the transition from central planning to EU integration, which corresponds to a policy cycle, a complementarity index based on structural indicators compiled...

This article focusses on self-assessed unmet needs for financial reasons. We study its social and economic determinants and its consequences on future health status, from a longitu- dinal dataset: the French Heath, Health care and Insurance Survey (Enquête Santé Protection Sociale). We first...

This paper studies the determinants of poverty dynamics in several rural areas from Madagascar. A particular attention is devoted to testing if rural poverty persistence in Madagascar could be explained by a vicious circle leading to a poverty trap. Annual poverty transitions retrieved from an...

This paper proposes an econometric analysis of the effects of three kinds of socio-political instability - violent, social and elite - on foreign aid allocation. Arellano and Bond [1991] application of the generalized method of moments estima­tions show that the effect of socio-political...

In an extended variant of the life-cycle hypothesis, saving behaviour is shown to depend crucially on the interaction between two preference parameters : γ, which represents risk attitudes (aversion, prudence…), and δ, the rate of time depreciation. Hence, the predictions of four specific...

This paper investigates empirically how three types of socio-political instability—elite, violent, and social—influence international aid allocation by donors. The results indicate that aid allocation depends on the type of instability (the effect of violent and elite instability is...

Efficiency of financial markets is one of the most studied subjects in theoretical finance. Formalization of this idea is realised by the random walk model. Numerous tests have been developed to validate the hypothesis of identically and independently distributed innovations. But the results of...