Several of the Middle East’s traditional economic institutions hampered its political development by limiting checks on executive power, preventing the formation of organized and durable opposition movements, and keeping civil society weak. They include Islam’s original tax system, which failed to protect property rights; the waqf, whose rigidity hampered the development of civil society; and p...

The topic of rising income inequality is an Anglo-Saxon problem. According to World Bank data for a large sample of countries, Gini coefficients on market income have increased in the last four decades for the Unites States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand (Table 1 in the Appendix). The trend is insignificant for most of the other large industrialized countries, among them (West) Germany,,1...

This paper examines the effects of family structure on family income and food consumption, using fixed-effects to control for unobservable characteristics of the family. The effects of divorce on the family income and family-level consumption of children born to two-parent households, and the effects of marriage on children born into singleparent households are both considered. In the year foll...

Economic theory suggests that a commitment by a firm to increased levels of disclosure should lower the information asymmetry component of the firm's cost of capital. But while the theory is compelling, so far empirical results relating increased levels of disclosure to measurable economic benefits have been mixed. One explanation for the mixed results among studies using data from firms public...

We use an event study approach to examine the economic consequences of hospital admissions for adults in two datasets: survey data from the Health and Retirement Study, and hospitalization data linked to credit reports. For non-elderly adults with health insurance, hospital admissions increase out-of-pocket medical spending, unpaid medical bills and bankruptcy, and reduce earnings, income, acce...

BACKGROUND Obesity is an established risk factor for several chronic diseases. The lifetime health and economic consequences of obesity for individual patients have not been documented. OBJECTIVE To estimate the lifetime health and economic consequences of obesity. METHODS We developed a dynamic model of the relationship between body mass index and the risks and associated costs of 5 obesit...

Adequate nutrition is a key factor to live an active and healthy life. In spite of its importance as a determinant of health and development, malnutrition is still a neglected area and too little has been done to address its causes and serious social and economic implications. However, recently there has been growing interest in nutrition with stronger political involvement at national and inte...

Diabetic foot complications result in huge costs for both society and the individual patients. Few reports on the health-economic consequences of diabetic foot infections have been published. In studies considering a wide societal perspective, costs of antibiotics were relatively low, whereas total costs for topical treatment were high relative to the total costs of foot infections. Total direc...

The programme of qualification and improvement of materials for use in a fusion power station is crucial to the introduction of fusion power into the energy market and power plant studies are used to guide the targets for materials development. It is common to mis-interpret these targets as minimum values that must be achieved for fusion power to be a viable energy source, implying that failure...

This thesis addresses questions in the Economics of Crime regarding the effect of crime on GDP per capita and its growth rate, and criminal choices. The first part of the thesis presents evidence concerning the effect of crime on economic outcomes in Italy. Using an Instrumental Variables (IV) strategy and a system GMM approach, the empirical exercise identifies the effect of different crimes o...