Our paper proposes to establish the political economy determinants of cross-industry distribution of protection in Tunisia in the post-independence period. Instead of the lobbying hypothesis, we assume that the government was seeking legitimacy and to that end, chose import substitution as...

In the last few decades, the informal sector has played a major role in many of the LDC’s labor markets. Yet, little is known about the dynamics of this sector. This paper addresses an important question, namely whether informal employment is a stepping stone, as first argued by economists...

This paper is motivated by the growing empirical evidence suggesting large firm dynamism in all market oriented economies and the significant role that this dynamism plays in promoting reallocation of resources and ultimately productivity growth. It attempts to make two major contributions:...

In 2002 elections more than half of the voters cast their ballots for a different party than the one they chose in 1999. Two new parties received more than two-fifths of the votes. The combined vote share of the three incumbent parties dropped to 14.7 percent from 53.4 in 1999. The 1999 and 2002...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the determinants of financial structure in non-listed Moroccan manufacturing firms using a panel data approach. There is a relatively vast body of theory-derived literature relating corporate capital structure to firm and industry...

The prolonged war in Iraq, the political turmoil in Lebanon, the heightened tension between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the specter of an attack on Iran have all significantly shaken business uncertainty levels in several MENA countries. Sovereign risk – the credit risk assessment...

This paper investigates the roles of human capital and openness in the process of technology diffusion and productivity growth in the Mediterranean agricultural sector. We estimate a nonlinear productivity growth specification that nests the logistic and the confined exponential technology...

How extensive is the Turkish unofficial economy? An accurate answer to this question has considerable practical significance for various aspects of economic policy – particularly employment, fiscal and migration policies. Estimates based on macroeconomic data tend to be too imprecise. We...

The purpose of this research paper is to examine social Islamic mutual funds’ financial performance. Since Islamic mutual funds have only been around for the past two decades, most of the research on this topic is fairly new. In this study we apply the single factor model of Schwert and Seguin...

This study investigates the main causes and indicators of smuggling in both import and export sections of the Iranian Economy and estimates an absolute index of smuggling in Iran during the period 1970-2002. To this effect, Multiple Causes -Multiple Indicators (MIMIC) econometric modeling by...