The economic impact of climate change is usually measured as the extent to which the climate of a given period affects social welfare in that period. This static approach ignores the dynamic effects through which climate change may affect economic growth and hence future welfare. In this paper...

This paper discusses some of the elements that may characterise an efficient strategy to adapt to a changing climate. Such a strategy will have to reflect the long time horizon of, and the prevailing uncertainties about, climate change. An intuitively appealing approach therefore seems to be to...

Monetary valuation of climate-change impacts, and the cost-benefit analysis of climate-change policy into which it feeds, has long been controversial. Writers in ecological economics have done much to illuminate its difficulties. For the purposes of this paper, the key difficulties of the...

In this paper we analyze the interaction of income and preference heterogeneity in a political economy framework. We ask whether the presence of preference heterogeneity (arising, for example, from different ethnic groups or geographic locations) affects the ability of the poor to extract...

In this paper we examine the main challenges in promoting an effective market economy. While the paper ranges widely across the spectrum of economic institutions and policies, the central theme is the importance of macroeconomic stability for economic growth in the medium and long run....

In this paper, we measure the implications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Palestinian employment and earnings. We quantify the conflict by the frequency of temporary closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the number of overseas foreign workers in the Israeli labor market. Data on...

Consumerism is often held to be inimical to collective deliberation and decision-making of the sort required to address pressing environmental, humanitarian and global justice issues. Policy interventions and academic discourse alike often assume that transforming consumption practices requires...

Public investments in innovation and research assets have been recently perceived by policy makers as an effective tool for the development of less developed regions. This has been particularly true in the case of the European cohesion policies and the structural funds expenditures. However, the...

The extent to which financial markets are rational, efficient processors of information has perhaps never been as much in doubt as it is now during the ongoing global financial crisis. This paper engages with this debate directly by investigating the effects of one particular type of...

This thesis composes of four empirical studies with an attempt to assess the role of institutions as key determinant of cross-country development. We have unbundled the different facets of institutions, including the security of property rights, democracy, regulation and stability of monetary...