This contribution investigates the direct and indirect causal interactions between financial deepening, trade openness and economic growth for 13 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Using a rather general approach to identify indicators for financial deepening and to detect Granger causality...

This paper examines the short-term and long-run dynamics between per capita GDP growth and openness for 158 countries over the period 1970-2009. We use panel cointegration tests and panel error-correction models (ECM) in combination with GMM estimation to explore the causal relationship between...

Growth, inequality, and poverty are central elements of the development process. However the mutual effects and directions of causality have been, and remain, one of the most controversial issues. After introducing a simple theoretical framework we derive some fundamental relations between...

Popular opinion suggests that malfunctioning, poorly designed incentive schemes in financial firms that encouraged greed and involved excessive salaries were responsible for the excessive risk taking that eventually led to the 2008 financial crash. In this paper we discuss this claim in a...

Over the last twenty years piracy has become an increasing threat. Yet there are only very few econometric studies that examine under which conditions this phenomenon arises. As the number of maritime piracy and armed robbery incidents is characterized as count data and exhibits overdispersion,...

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the institutional environment and the entrepreneur’s education on firm growth in Vietnam. Using a firm-level dataset, we obtain a balanced panel data from 2006 to 2009 for 37,788 registered enterprises from a unique data set. We analyze the effects...

This contribution tests for causality between financial deepening, trade openness and economic development for 16 Sub-Saharan African countries. An advanced econometric methodology is used to add to existing empirical evidence. Only limited support is found for finance promoting regional...

In this paper, we investigate the role of the social network nexus and the insurance nexus in determining household savings and productive capital formation in rural Vietnam. We analyze the issue in two dimensions, stocks and flows, and consider the exposure to negative shocks. The instrumental...