Small-scale activities in developing countries face environmental risks that represent direct threats to populations’ health and livelihoods. Recently, some donors and experts have claimed that microfinance institutions (MFIs) could play a role in fostering pro-environmental behaviours among...

We test the notion that a government may rely less on taxes and more on inflation to finance its expenditures the larger the size of the shadow economy. In a sample of developed and developing countries over the 1999-2007 period, we indeed report a negative relation between the tax burden and...

There is now an increasing consensus that the effects of microfinance on self-employment are limited, with two common interpretations. The microeconomic approach suggests that the poor lack the skills, the resources and the motivation to start their own business. The macroeconomic approach...

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of fund of hedge fund net leverage and alpha where the cost of borrowing is increasing with net leverage, thereby impacting the performance. We use this model to determine the conditions under which the leverage has a negative or a positive impact on...

In this paper, we show the interest of the time-varying coefficient model in hedge fund performance assessment and selection. We argue that the alpha of hedge funds is dynamic and that the time-varying alpha captures this dynamic behavior. Therefore, forming portfolios based on their...

In this article, tests for globalization and contagion are separated using an ex ante definition of crises, and contagion tests are neutralized with respect to globalization effects. A large database is constructed to study the stability of correlation matrices for four asset classes: equities,...

Pension fund returns can be decomposed into different sources, including market movements, asset allocation policy, and active portfolio management. We use a unique database covering the asset allocations of US defined-benefit pension funds for the period 1990-2008, and we test the role of each...

The aim of this paper is to offer a contribution to the analysis of the under-representation of women economists in academic positions in Italy, focusing on publications. In Italy women’s proportion of PhDs in Economics and Statistics has increased from 39 to 52 per cent in the last decade....

Economists have been blamed for their inability to forecast and address crises. This paper attributes this inability to intertwined factors: the lack of a coherent definition of crises, the reference class problem, the lack of imagination regarding the nature of future crises, and sample...

This paper studies the impact of social trust and formal legal and institutional determinants of capital accumulation in a panel of countries. It reports that formal determinants and trust interact, and that the two are substitutes. Specifically, the marginal impact of formal legal institutions...