This study contributes to the investigation of the macro-finance interface by assessing the economic content and risk based interpretation of widely employed risk factors in the specification of empirical asset pricing models, i.e., Fama-French size and value, and Carhart momentum factors, as...

This paper empirically estimates a micro-founded model which studies the macroeconomic impact of environmental and financial risks on consumption choices in the Mediterranean Region. The analysis is carried out using time series aggregate data for fourteen Mediterranean countries over the period...

In electoral competitions, interest groups will be willing to finance politicians that require funding for campaign advertising, in exchange for policy favors. Our model predicts that interest groups with more extreme preferences will devote more resources to campaign financing. This occurs...

We develop a model with intra-generational consumption externalities, based on the overlapping generation version of Diamond (1965) model. More specifically, we consider a two-period lived overlapping generation economy, assuming that the utility of each consumer depends also on the average...

This paper investigates the response of the shadow economy to banking crises. Our empirical analysis, based on a large sample of countries, suggests that the informal sector is a powerful buffer, which expands at times of banking crises and absorbs a large proportion of the fall in official...

Even though land reform may be an effective means of reducing poverty, evidence on its causal effects is scant. This paper uses household panel data combined with a quasi- experimental program to assess the impact of a joint Malawi/World Bank land redistribution project on households’...

In the theory of psychological games it is assumed that players' preferences on material consequences depend on endogenous beliefs. Most of the applications of this theoretical framework assume that the psychological utility functions representing such preferences are common knowledge. But this...

In a model with no given probability measure, we consider asset pricing in the presence of frictions and other imperfections and characterize the property of coherent pricing, a notion related to (but much weaker than) the no arbitrage property. We show that prices are coherent if and only if...

Inflation forecasts are a key ingredient for monetary policymaking - especially in an inflation targeting country such as South Africa. Generally, a typical Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) only includes a core set of variables. As such, other variables, e.g. such as alternative...

This paper investigates the relationships between export price and income elasticities, average unit values (AUVs) and market shares for the top world food exporters in the time period 1992-2011 using a panel data framework. Emerging countries and Spain show a high price elasticity unlike other...