The present work analyses the impact of free trade agreements (FTAs) on the improvement of trade flows for ten Middle East and North African Countries (MENA) for the period 1990-2010. An extended gravity model is estimated to analyse the average and individual impact of six FTAs (four...

In response to the problem of shrinking birthrates in the country, in October 2007, the head of the Georgian Orthodox church announced that he would personally baptize any third and further baby born to Orthodox families from that time. This study uses the initiative as a natural experiment to...

Fixed-effects models have become increasingly popular in social-science research. The possibility to control for unobserved heterogeneity makes these models a prime tool for causal analysis. Fixed-effects models have been derived and implemented for many statistical software packages for...

The objective of this article is to analyze the impact of capital structure on profitability. This impact can be explained by three essential theories: signaling theory, tax theory and the agency costs theory. From a sample of 9136 firms distributed on seven sectors taken over the period...

This paper empirically examines the causality between crime rates and economic growth using state level data in India. A reduced form equation has been estimated using instrumental variable approach to correct for joint endogeneity between crime and economic growth. Higher crimes may reduce...

In this paper, new estimating methods proposed for dynamic and static probit models with panel data. Simulation studies show that the proposed estimators work relatively well.

The paper gives new insights into the environmental taxation policy, demonstrating the existence of an inverse U-shaped relationship between environmental taxation and income in European countries. Our findings reveal this relationship to be influenced by enforcement of the rule of law, which...