We examine the importance of institutions and geography for determining workers' wages and the return to capital. These returns to labor and capital are examined through the lens of labor and capital's productivities, which are directly related to the factors' returns. We estimate productivities...

This paper documents the nature and importance of agricultural trade flows between the six Irish Aid programme countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Ireland and the EU-15 over the period 1995-2003. The six countries are: Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Lesotho. Agricultural...

This paper offers an economic assessment of the opportunities and challenges provided by the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda, particularly through agricultural trade liberalization, for low-income countries seeking to trade their way out of poverty. After discussing links between poverty,...

Institutional change has taken place incrementally since 1978 for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the Industrial Sector of China. We will provide evidence for the notion that this is largely due to increased domestic competitive pressures and the opportunities arising from the integration of...

Some feminist writings have claimed that ‘bureaucracy’ is inherently ‘patriarchal’. This paper challenges this argument by comparing the experience of women in Ireland in a state sector organization and in a cluster of software firms. While the bureaucratic state company has been...

This paper investigates the existence of a bank lending and a bank capital channel in Austria by applying the dynamic Arellano-Bond GMM-estimator to a quarterly bank level dataset spanning from 1997 to 2003. While we do find evidence that the bank lending channel is in existence, with an...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate vulnerability to financial contagion in a set of expanding emerging markets of the Middle East and North Africa, during seven episodes of international financial crisis. Using Fry & Baur (2005) fixed-effect panel approach, we significantly reject the...

The European Union is currently concluding negotiations for Economic Partnership Agreements with 77 developing countries in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) regions. The dilemma at the heart of those negotiations is how to reconcile the goal of poverty reduction and development with the...

We assess the impact of the euro on financial integration. We document how the single currency has re-shaped financial markets and international investment patterns. We address the macroeconomic implications of enhanced financial integration, with a particular focus on the shift in net capital...

This paper uses international survey data to document two stylized facts. First, risk aversion is associated with anti-trade attitudes. Second, this effect is smaller in countries with greater levels of government expenditure. The paper thus provides evidence for the microeconomic underpinnings...