This paper aims to test the effect of smallholder farmers' participatory social learning on their gain of performance in a village of southwest China. By exploring a panel structure survey data collected in the village, we identify the social learning effect using a Spatial Autoregressive (SAR)...

Whether competition helps or hinders small firms' access to finance is in itself a much debated question in the economic literature and in policy circles, especially in the developing world. Economic theory offers conflicting predictions and empirical contributions provide mixed results. This...

Is there a strategically beneficial time for political leaders to make international environmental commitments? Based on the political cycles theory we argue that leaders have incentives to delay costly ratification of international environmental agreements to the post-electoral period. However,...

The ICMS-Ecológico is a fiscal transfer mechanism from states to municipalities, implemented in the early 1990's in Brazil, to reward municipalities for the creation and management of protected areas. This paper investigates the efficiency of this mechanism by testing for the presence of...

Most of countries covered by natural forests are developing countries, with limited ability to levy taxes and restrained access to international credit markets; consequently, they are amenable to draw heavily on two sources of government financing, namely seigniorage and deforestation revenues....

The European crisis has diverted migration flows away from countries affected by the recession towards Germany. The diversion process creates a challenge for traditional discrete-choice models that assume that only bilateral factors account for dyadic migration rates. This paper shows how taking...

Many studies have attempted to investigate the determinants and implications of competition in the banking industry. The literature on the measurement of competition can be divided between the structural and non-structural approaches. The structural approach infers the degree of competition from...

This paper examines empirically one of the most popular views in international economics, yet barely tested: undervaluation of the currency is a “beggar-thy-neighbor” policy. It assesses simultaneously the two closely related implications of the beggar-thy-neighbor view: (i) undervaluation...