War can have long-lasting effects on individual mental health through war trauma. In this paper, we explore the impact of constantly recalling painful episodes related to the 1992-1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina conflict on individual mental health in 2001 using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies...

Development economists have considered physical infrastructure to be a precondition for industrialization and economic development. Yet, two issues remain to be addressed in the literature. First, while proper identification of the causal effectiveness of infrastructure in reducing poverty is...

We estimate the impact of access to information and communication technology on agricultural profitability and child labor among isolated villages in rural Peru. We exploit the timing of an intervention that provided at least one public (satellite) payphone to 6,296 villages that did not...

A renewed interest in explaining growth in the Caribbean countries is motivated by the somewhat slow but uneven performance in the past decade: per capita GDP gaps in Caribbean countries have widened in relation to the United States, whereas standard theories would predict convergence. This...

Monetary coordination is high on the agenda of different regional organizations in Africa. Economic benefits of a common currency, like lower transaction cost, increased macroeconomic stability, or the shielding of central banks against political pressure from nationalist elites and their...

The WAEMU and the Franc CFA-Zone: A new culture of co-operation in Francophone Africa? The CFA-zone is basically composed of two sub-zones, characterised by significant structural economic and political differences within and between its member countries: the West African Economic and Monetary...

We investigate the effects that regional start-up activity has on employment in new and in incumbent businesses. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1987-2002 period. It shows that the effects of new businesses on employment in the incumbents are significantly positive and...

This paper investigates the impact of new firms' quality on the magnitude of their employment effects. Our results clearly show that the quality of start-ups, measured by their affiliation to sectors and innovative industries, strongly influences the direct and the overall employment...

We address the pitfalls of averaging by exploiting the longitudinal variation in aid to identify sudden and sharp increases in aid flows. Focusing on specific events, we test if aid accelerations correspond to policies and shocks in the recipient country. For a large sample of 145 recipient...

Critics of privatization argue that poor labor force restructuring is a key concern and that governments should establish better retrenchment programs. Using new data from arandom sample of 400 companies in the world, we test competing theories about the wisdom of retrenchment programs and their...