We use oil price fluctuations to test the impact of transfers from wealthy OPEC nations to their poorer Muslim allies. The instrument identifies plausibly exogenous variation in foreign aid. We investigate how aid is spent by tracking its short-run effect on aggregate demand, national accounts,...

Natural disasters occur in a political space. Although events beyond our control may trigger a disaster, the level of government preparedness and response greatly determines the extent of suffering incurred by the affected population. The authors use a political-economy model of disaster...

This paper looks at the gendered impacts of a development project that provided improved dairy cattle and training as part of a broader effort to develop a smallholder-friendly, market-oriented dairy value chain in Manica province, Mozambique. The project targeted households, registered cows in...

Using alternative measures of term lending rates and counterparty risk and a wide variety of econometric specifications, we find that counterparty risk has a robust significant effect on interest rate spreads in the term inter-bank loan markets. In contrast, we do not find comparably robust...

Empirical applications of structural equation modeling (SEM) typically rest on the assumption that the analysed sample is homogenous with respect to the underlying structural model or that homogenous subsamples have been formed based on a priori knowledge. However, researchers often are ignorant...

Over 95 per cent of Australian cotton producers have attempted to manage price risk at some time, using a range of management strategies. Nearly 60 per cent of Australian cotton producers surveyed in this study stated that price risk management had a positive effect on their farm business....

We contrast two measures of fuel poverty in New Zealand. The first is based on estimated expenditure of over 10% of household income on fuel. The second is self-reported deprivation of fuel because of an inability to afford it. Households denoted as fuel poor on the two measures are mostly...

In the past year, the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System began using a new macroeconomic model of the U.S. economy referred to as the FRB/US model. This system of mathematical equations, describing interactions among economic measures such as inflation, interest rates,...

Newspapers play an important role in selecting, defining and communicating pertinent social issues, especially during changing times. Yet, in the case of the transition to a new dispensation in South Africa, it seems that there has been very little sustained analysis of the news media in terms...