Current debate on the energy security in the EU often stresses the EU dependency on gas imports from Russia. However, Russia is no less dependent on the EU – more than half of its gas exports goes to Europe. The purpose of this paper is to characterize this mutual dependency through an...

We use a novel approach to address the question of whether a union of sovereign countries can efficiently raise and allocate a budget, even when members are purely self-interested and participation is voluntary. The main innovation of our model is to explore the link between budget contributions...

Despite a voluminous literature on the topic, the question of whether foreign aid leads to growth is still controversial. To observe the pure effect of aid, researchers used instruments that must be exogenous to growth and explain well aid flows. This paper argues that instruments used in the...

Intermediaries helping individuals and firms with the government bureaucracy are common in developing countries. Although such bureaucracy intermediaries are, anecdotally, linked with corruption and welfare losses, few formal analyses exist. <p> In our model, a government license can benefit...</p>

This paper studies the effect of elections and democracy on bond and equity flows to emerging countries. Our results indicate that elections affect portfolio flows: the period following an election is generally characterised by a fall in equity flows, and this occurs only where the incumbent is...

This paper proposes a Transit Risk Index (TRI) designed to assess the riskiness of pipeline gas imports and to study the effect of introducing new gas routes. TRI controls for gas dependency, transit route diversification, political risks of transit, pipeline rupture probability, and the balance...

How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a...

This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich dataset of Russian scientists and US citations to Soviet-era publications. Analysis of a panel of US cities and scientific fields shows that citations to Soviet-era work increased significantly with...

We argue that the nature of aid flows early on in a bilateral partnership may be different from that at a later stage. Commercial and strategic interests may carry particular weight after a significant regime change when new relationships need to be established, whereas development concerns come...

Low income countries, and in particular countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, have invested huge resources over the last 40 years in financing higher (university level) education, compared with the number of students at that level and with the corresponding expenditures for lower levels of education....