We examine the role of democracy shocks in the cross-country economic growth processes over a period of five decades since 1960. The recent uprisings that arose independently and spread across the Arab world form the main context of our investigation. We study if (i) a shock to democracy in one...

This paper investigates the effect of oil price shocks on government expenditures on the health and education sectors in Saudi Arabia. Using a quarterly dataset 1990Q1-2017Q2 and employing a non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model, our research shows evidence of a non-linear...

This paper assesses several early warning (EWS) models of financial crises to propose a model that can predict the incidence of a currency crisis in developing countries. For this purpose, we employ the equal weighting (EW) and dynamic model averaging (DMA) approaches to combine forecast from...

Education is a crucial determinant of child quality. Economic theory and empirical research suggest a trade-off between the quantity and quality of children. Larger families facing tighter constraints are likely to distribute resources among children unevenly, which can adversely affect...

This paper quantifies the macroeconomic spillover effects of conflict within sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries using a new Conflict Spillover Index (CSI), which accounts for conflict intensity and distance from conflict-affected countries. Our findings reveal an escalation in conflict...

This study investigates the factors leading to exclusion and their detrimental impacts in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It employs two-levels of analysis: a macro-level estimation of the influence of exclusion and marginalization on violent conflict, and a micro-level investigation identifying the...