We study the changing relationship between Brent oil prices and geopolitical risk, conditional on physical oil market conditions. We conduct the analysis at three frequencies, medium (1-3 years), high (2-3 months), and very high (daily), using three complementary techniques at the different...

This paper investigates the effects of low oil prices and heightened geopolitical risks on economic growth and investment in the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. We employ a Global Vector Autoregression (GVAR) model with 53 countries, including 15 MENA countries, over the period...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between corruption, political instability and economic growth. We first show how these variables interact by allowing for bidirectional causality between each two of the three variables for which we employ a panel VAR model on a dataset of 140...

Using an original firm-level dataset and utilizing the incidence of the Egyptian uprising of 2011, this paper provides an empirical investigation of the effects of firms' political connections on employment growth in Egypt. We use the differences-in-differences (DiD) framework to compare...

Africa's recent economic performance has been quite impressive. However, strong economic growth has not always corresponded to sufficient poverty reduction, partly because it has failed to generate productive employment. This paper compares the experiences of two fast growing African countries...

This paper examines the FDI response to political shocks. We first investigate whether political or institutional quality is an important determinant of FDI inflows using a panel VAR model in a dataset of 146 countries over the period of 1989-2015. Then, we exploit the Arab Spring incidence to...

This paper investigates the relationship between the recent global financial crisis and child labour in Tanzania. Using the difference-in-difference methodological framework, we identify households' access to credit as a possible transmission channel of the financial crisis to child labour....

We present new and rigorous mechanisms - a major weakness of the extant literature till date - to study spatiotemporal dynamic spillover effects of democratic shocks on cross-country economic growth in general and in Arab Spring, in particular. As a centrality of our research, we investigate how...

We investigate the joint dynamics of oil prices, financial liquidity and geopolitical risk, within a multi-country global vector-autoregressive (GVAR) model. We find that low oil prices are expected to trigger higher levels of geopolitical risk, and that decelerating financial liquidity serves...