The paper presents a global model with systemic and country risks, as well as commodity prices. We show that systemic risk shocks have an important impact on world economic activity, with the busts in world output gap corresponding to unobserved systemic risk associated with major financial...

In this paper we argue that religion and welfare state spending are substitute mechanisms that insure individuals against adverse life events. As a result, individuals who are religious are predicted to prefer lower levels of social insurance than will individuals who are secular. To the extent...

Recent theoretical and empirical work has demonstrated a clear negative link between macroeconomic and political uncertainty and levels of private investment across countries. This result raises the question what institutions might help reduce this uncertainty, in particular by allowing host...