Globalization is often credited with the expansion of the welfare state and increased spending on social insurance programs. However, empirical evidence on the relationship between globalization and social welfare spending is mixed. One possible explanation for these mixed results might be...

The objective of this paper is to review the transmission mechanisms uniting equity market development and economic growth in developing countries. We find that the theoretical impact of equity markets is ambiguous. At the domestic level, the allocation function of equity markets appears...

This paper analyzes the existence of flight-to-quality from stocks to bonds and contagion between the two asset classes. Flight-to-quality is present if correlations between stocks and bonds strongly decrease in falling stock markets since this constitutes a movement of the asset classes in...

Recent research suggests that social cost-benefit analysis should be con- ducted with a declining discount rate. For instance, Newell and Pizer [23] show that the U.S. certainty-equivalent discount rate declines through time, using a simple autoregressive model of U.S. interest rates. This paper...

Despite generous debt reduction under the HIPC initiative, Nicaragua is not growing at the rate required to alleviate poverty. This paper outlines Nicaragua’s vulnerability to external changes and its inability to compete in the global market. Nicaragua suffers from severe structural problems;...

Classification-

Pressure to automatically exclude terrorists from asylum has increased since the late 1990s, including exclusion based on mere membership of terrorist organizations. Such pressure has emanated from the UN General Assembly, the Security Council, regional organizations, States and even UNHCR. Yet...

Although the worldwide growth in dollarization of bank deposits has recently slowed, it has already reached very high levels in dozens of countries. Building on earlier findings that allowed the main cross-country variations in the share of dollars to be explained in terms of national policies...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the MENA’s potential for portfolio diversification benefits by examining long run equity linkages with daily data over the 1998-2004 periods. Our analysis is based on several co-integration analyses and an extension of Akdogan measures of financial...

This study sheds light on the development of family structures in a polygamous context and offers an explanation for the association between outcomes of children and the status of their mothers among wives, based on observable maternal characteristics. Using a game theoretical approach I show...