The 2008 episode of food price explosion, political turmoil and human suffering revealed important flaws in the current global food architecture. This paper argues that to safeguard the strengths of the current system, four failures in market functioning and policymaking need to be addressed....

Investors who want to profitably trade stocks which they believe to be undervalued or overvalued are facing not just transaction costs: also cash constraints and short-selling restriction can hinder them. Intuitively, the more onerous friction may seem to be short-selling: borrowing shares from...

In the context of the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, we conduct a comparative analysis of incomes of farm households relative to non-farm households over the last two decades. We use household-based budget surveys from 1984 to 2004 that are collected and harmonized by the...

Recent studies have documented that auditor industry specialization is associated with higher audit fees for public firms in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. This paper uses a unique dataset that consists of all audit engagements for the year 2004 to examine this issue in Belgium. We document...

I summarize recent advances in the literature on inflation dynamics. This has been a very productive area of research due to the development of the so-called New Keynesian model and the availability of new macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence. Nevertheless, there still remain a number of...

This paper discusses the impact of increasing standards in food production and trade on the export opportunities of low-income countries and on development in these countries. The increase in food standards is often seen as a threat to poor countries, diminishing their export opportunities and...

In the literature on the evolution of farming systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, the food versus cash debate on the competition versus complementarity between food and export crops (such as cotton) in agricultural development seems to offer contrasting views on rural development. The purpose of the...

This study extends the growing literature (e.g., Kinney and McDaniel (1989), Richardson et al. (2002), Palmrose et al. (2004), Desai et al. (2006)) on restatements of financial statements of companies due to non-GAAP reporting.2 This paper examines the influence of announcing an accounting...

After 50 years of independence, Africa is still a profoundly agrarian continent where 2/3 of the people directly or indirectly derive their living from agriculture. The central question facing African governments and donor agencies today is “What can be done to transform agriculture in...

This article reviews ideas and results from the politico-economic literature on the efficiency and stability of national borders. In particular, we discuss the relations between the determination of national borders and democratization, global economic integration, international and civil...