Despite being a fixture of everyday life in the Arab world, wasta, which may be thought of as special influence by members of the same group or tribe, has received little attention from social scientists. Our casual empiricism suggests that wasta is an important determinant of how economic...

This paper argues that trade and capital account reforms within autocracies underlie the primacy of foreign currency procurement. A longitudinal comparison of four countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan) in the Middle East and North Africa region shows a historical sequencing of reforms....

This paper studies the sustainability of the Ottoman budget for the period from 1680 to 1747, during different sultanates and war eras. Moreover, we investigate whether the relationship between government revenues and expenditures changes in the period of culus. The empirical evidence gathered...

We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and...

This paper investigates effects of forced marriages in the Pol Pot regime on educational investments for their children. Specifically, we focus on the difference in educational investments between the couples who faced different social environments under the Pol Pot regime. Using the complete...

German-Pakistani relations cannot be analyzed in isolation of the larger domestic and international trajectories, economic and political, on both sides of the partnership. After a recent democratic power transfer in 2013, Pakistan continues to face complex challenges. The instable security...

In this paper, we use new historical data on the most popular stocks traded at the Istanbul bourse between 1910 and 1914, to examine the effect of wars on stock market prices. During this period, the Ottoman Empire was involved in the Turco-Italian and the Balkan wars, leading to massive land...

In this study, we focused on analysing and differentiating the determinants of conventional insurance and Tak¯aful demand across ASEAN and Middle East Regions. We used panel data econometrics on a sample of 14 Asian countries having both conventional insurance and Tak¯aful over the period...

We investigate the effect of delay on prices in bargaining situations using a data set containing thousands of captives ransomed from Barbary pirates between 1575 and 1692. Plausibly exogenous variation in the delay in ransoming provides ev- idence that negotiating delays decreased the size of...

The effect of liberal colonialism on the allocation of capital persists to this day. As Lange et al. (Colonialism and development: A comparative analysis of Spanish and British colonies. 2006) define and suggest, the authors exploit the colonial history of China during 1896-1911 with qualitative...