Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion requires that individuals make financial...

In this paper, we examine the empirical relationship between current account balance and output volatility in a panel data framework using annual data from 185 countries over the period from 1950 to 2010. In our static panel data analysis, we find that a larger current account deficit is...

This study investigates the empirical relationship between the level of urbanization and size of the informal economy using cross-country datasets proxying GDP and employment shares of urban informal sector. Our estimation results indicate that there is an inverted-U relationship between...