This paper argues that making affordable home mortgage loans available to a large cross section of the population will serve both the redistributive and growth-enhancing objectives of poverty reduction policies. The current state of housing and mortgage markets in selected Middle East and North...

Institutional transparency makes future contingencies more easily predictable for investors. Greater transparency can be achieved through vertical and horizontal integration of policy rules, which may result in lower Knightian uncertainty (ambiguity). In a model based on cumulative prospect...

Ambiguity, as opposed to uncertainty, reflects lack of sufficient information about distribution and payoffs of infrequent events. Reforms are infrequent events, undertaken in ambiguous second-best environments where bad reform outcomes are feasible. A general case for the gradualist reform...

A reduction in the legal workweek may induce a degree of downward wage flexibility, while an employment subsidy to firms accommodates downward wage rigidity. It may be possible, therefore, to increase employment with a policy that combines a reduction in the workweek with an employment subsidy....

Presumptive taxation has been adopted in many countries to tax hard-to-tax activities and reduce evasion. Further, in view of the possible efficiency gains from such techniques, a case can be made for adopting presumptive taxation of global income. This paper addresses two questions. First,...

Import and export stability is examined under two alternative nominal exchange rate anchors, the U.S. dollar and the SDR. Stability under the two pegs depends critically on import and export elasticity with respect to exchange rates. The implications of import and export elasticity for an...

Knightian uncertainty (ambiguity) implies presence of uninsurable risks. Institutional quality may be a good indicator of Knightian uncertainty. This paper correlates non-life insurance penetration in 70 countries with income level, financial sector depth, country risk, a measure of cost of...

Excess wages tax (EWT) is a tax-based incomes policy instrument introduced in many centrally-planned economies and still used in some FSU and Eastern European countries in transition. The main macroeconomic goal of EWT is to curb inflationary pressures by penalizing through taxation the...

With cross-section data from 53 emerging and mature markets, we provide evidence that equity premium puzzle is a global phenomenon. In addition to risk aversion, equity premium may reflect ambiguity aversion. We explore the sources of equity premium using some pertinent fundamental independent...

We compare the dollar peg to a dollar-euro basket peg as alternative exchange rate regimes for the incipient Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) currency union. Quantitative evidence suggests basket peg does not dominate dollar peg for improving external stability. However, as GCC exports and...