In this paper I investigate the effects of disasters on human capital accumulation using an extensive panel dataset on natural disasters, covering 170 countries over a 25 year period (1980-2004). My analysis shows that disasters have both a direct, contemporaneous effect and a long-term,...

We study two different safe haven assets, US government bonds and gold, and examine how the price changes of these assets can be used to infer investor behaviour under uncertainty. We find that investors are ambiguity-averse, that is they buy gold when faced with extreme uncertainty about the...

This paper analyzes the impact of organized crime on the allocation of public transfers. We assemble an innovative data set on Italian mafia and public funds to businesses at municipality level and instrument current mafia activity with rainfall in the XIX century and geographical shifters of...

This paper describes the construction of a social accounting matrix with disaggregated agricultural and food industry sectors for Ireland for the purpose of agri-food policy simulations. The base year for the AgriFood–SAM is 2005 and it draws on a recently constructed 2005 SAM for Ireland...

This paper studies the impact of international financial integration on corporate financing choices, at a country level. Examining publically quoted firms of 24 emerging economies over the 1995-2007 period, we find that greater bond market integration is associated with increased leverage and a...

The debate over the use of tariffs or value added taxes in developing countries has focused on the difficulty of collecting VAT from the informal sector of the economy. This paper contributes by considering this issue with heterogeneous firms and endogenous entry. This yields two new results....

Prior research suggests an inverse relationship between geographic distance and financial market linkages. In this paper, we examine whether and how cultural distance between countries mitigates this finding. We find that country-pairs exhibit higher linkages if they have smaller cultural...

This paper investigates the extent of price transmission from international to domestic markets for selected agricultural products in Uganda, so as to assess the likely impact of increased market access on agricultural household poverty in rural Uganda. The study applies a variety of econometric...

Successive reforms of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy since 1992 have gradually switched support from market and price management to direct payments, which since 2005 are largely decoupled. This more market-oriented CAP means that farmers must now take responsibility for managing those...