This paper on Trade Agreements within SSA, is an assessment of the ex post bilateral trade effect of the European Union-African Caribbean Pacific Preferential Trade Agreement (EU-ACP PTA) and sub-regional regional trade agreements (RTAs) on bilateral trade involving SSA countries. The main...

Following closely the analytical approach adopted by Head and Mayer (2004) and Novy (2010), this paper derives a micro-founded bilateral trade cost measure for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a function of observable domestic and inter-national trade data. The derived measure of trade cost by Novy...

Motivated by a set of stylised facts based on provincial data for India, this paper investigates the incidence of urban poverty by modelling the impact of technological progress in the formal sectors of the economy on the urban informal wage in a four-sector general equilibrium framework with...

The paper examines the flow of workers between employment states, the role of education in these transitions and the impact of the transitions on earnings. It uses panel data for three waves (2005/06, 2009/10 and 2010/11) of household surveys in Uganda. We estimate transition probability...

In this paper we estimate the causal effects of conflict on dietary energy supply in Côte d’Ivoire. To identify the true impact of conflict, we use prewar and post-war household data bracketing the conflict period and the spatial variation in the prevalence of conflict between the North and...

This study examines the determinants of educational outcome in eight selected MENA countries. The complicated structure of the TIMSS data has been considered carefully during all the stages of the analysis employing plausible values and jackknife standard error technique to accommodate the...

International aid has an ambiguous effect on the macro-economy of the recipient country. To the extent that aid raises consumer expenditure, there will be some real exchange rate appreciation and a shift of resources away from traded goods production and into non-traded goods production....

Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the origins of the Sicilian mafia have remained a largely unresolved mystery. Both institutional and historical explanations have been proposed in the literature through the years. In this paper, we develop an argument for a market...

This paper investigates gender inequality of academic achievement using mean and quantile decomposition analysis in eight selected MENA countries. We use data from TIMSS 2007 to decompose the test scores gap between boys and girls at the eighth grade. There is a mixed picture of gender...

This study assesses the response of the trade balance to exchange rate fluctuations across a large number of countries. Fixed-effects regressions are estimated for 87 countries on annual data from 1994 to 2010. The trade balance improves significantly after a real depreciation, and to a similar...