In this paper we estimate a time-series model of the financial asset portfolio shares in Egypt, distinguishing between assets of varying degrees of liquidity and between domestic currency and foreign currency deposits. While financial liberalization and financial stability are found to have encouraged domestic residents to increase the share of their portfolio composed of domestic currency asse...

The Political Economy of Conscription Though in decline recently, military conscription is still a widely used mode of staffing armies. Since not many valid economic, social or military arguments in favor of the draft can be put forward, the question emerges why societies choose to rely on it. In this survey we explain the political allure of military conscription by its specific intraand inter...

Article history: Received 14 November 2014 Received in revised form 20 May 2015 Accepted 21 May 2015 Available online 29 May 2015 This paper investigates the relationship between political instability and labour market institutions. We develop a theoretical model in which political instability creates incentives for a government to introduce labour market regulation in the economy. The distorti...

Article history: Received 21 April 2008 Received in revised form 13 May 2009 Accepted 14 May 2009 Available online 27 May 2009 This paper assumes that the decision makers of OPEC (or at least of its core members) are interested in both profits and political payoffs (support, popularity, being a hero of the Arab or Islamic street, etc.). The oil weapon, i.e. a reduction of output is the most pow...

The motivations of the Arab Spring that have marked the history of humanity over the last few months have left political economists, researchers, governments and international policymakers pondering over how the quality of political institutions affect consumer welfare in terms of commodity prices. This paper investigates the effects of political establishments on consumer prices in the African...

This paper theoretically and empirically studies the impact of corporate governance level on firms’ choice in two political strategies: lobbying and making political contributions. The theoretical model implies that managers with short-run personal interest, prefer making political contributions; while shareholders caring about firms’ longterm success, are willing to do informational lobbying. ...

We investigate the relationship between low-level incidents of political violence and communication patterns seven months after the 2012 Ivorian Civil War using network traffic from all of Orange Telecom’s Côte d’Ivoire cell towers and 500,000 randomly sampled cell phone subscribers. We first show that in the days preceding small violent incidents, mobile phone call volumes increase by 10% and ...

This paper addresses the issue of causality in the relationship between various types of institutions—namely, political and economic freedom—and long-run economic growth. It is shown that existing empirical studies of these relationships provide evidence of correlation, but not causation. Granger causality tests of freedom vs. growth, and freedom vs. investment are conducted using aggregate mea...

Recent research has underlined the efficiency of the GATT/WTO rules from the standpoint of politically motivated governments, emphasizing that the current multilateral rules are capable of delivering a politically efficient equilibrium. Such an equilibrium is, however, economically inefficient. Global free trade, in particular, is generally unattainable even in a fully cooperative world, provid...

Subsidies linked to production have been classified to be environmentally harmful by OECD. A core element of the EU 2003 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform is to decouple income support from production. This paper estimates the environmental consequences of this policy reform. An agricultural sector model using a modified version of the positive mathematical programming method depicts the ...