A fixed exchange rate regime eliminates one degree of freedom in absorbing macroeconomic shocks. Therefore, there is a call for higher labor market flexibility in countries which are members of the monetary union or those which intend to join the monetary union. Focusing on the cross-country...

Why are socially beneficial reforms not implemented? One simple answer to this question (which has received little attention in the literature) is that this may be caused by generalized uncertainty about the effectiveness of reforms. If agents are unsure about whether a proposed reform will...

Why are socially beneficial reforms not implemented? One simple answer to this question (which has received little attention in the literature) is that this may be caused by generalised uncertainty about the effectiveness of reforms. If agents are unsure about whether a proposed reform will...

The 2010 European debt crisis has revived the discussion concerning the optimum adjustment strategy in the face of asymmetric shocks. Whereas Mundell's (1961) seminal theory on optimum currency areas suggests depreciation in the face of crisis, the most recent emergence of competitive...

The Internet has significantly expanded worldwide, changing our relationship with the world, and the way we communicate, educate, and inform ourselves. Africa, despite having a very low number of fixed-broadband subscriptions for 100 inhabitants, has not escaped the Internet phenomenon, as the...

We examine the role of new decentralized media (the internet) vs old media (television) on individuals' political engagement in North Africa. Drawing our data from the Afrobarometer round 5 survey, we tackle issues of endogeneity by resorting first to a propensity score matching method to...

The importance of international migration for its economic and social implications is nowadays widely acknowledged both in the academic literature and advocacy reports. Recently the debate has stimulated the inclusion of environmental factors into the possible explanations of migration, in order...

Climate change is expected to disproportionately affect agriculture; however, there is limited information on smallholder farmers ' overall vulnerability and adaptation needs. This paper estimates the impact of climatic shocks on the household agricultural income and subsequently, on farmers '...

In this paper, we analyze how a set of slow moving determinants affect trade between the EU on one hand, and CEECs (Central and Eastern European countries) and African countries on the other hand, over the period 2005-2012. We focus on two sets of slow moving determinants, doing business...