Financial contracts represent an exchange of financial resources today, such as money, for a promise to return more financial resources tomorrow. The aim of the paper is to test whether cheating or respecting a promise, in particular a “financial one”, is also a matter of community norms in...

We discuss the role of foreign exchange reserves as precautionary savings under an imperfect market framework due to the presence of endogenously determined borrowing constraints. We show that cost of holding reserves is higher in borrowing constrained economies than unconstrained ones as a...

This paper explores the interactions between the risk of food insecurity and the decision to health insure in the Palestinian Territories. The risk of adverse health conditions is insurable; the risk of food insecurity is a background risk and no market insurance exists. The vulnerability to food...

This paper analyses the impact of bureaucratic corruption on fiscal policy outcomes for economies that have constituted to a greater or lessen extent independent central banks. The adverse implications of corruption on debt accumulation are verified using a cross-sectional setting of 77...

Why do nations with heterogeneous economies, geographic positions and institutions agree to dispatch their troops to remote conflict areas? This paper explores the domestic and international determinants of countries' contribution to peacekeeping operations from 1999 to 2009. Individual nations...

The paper investigates whether social capital can affect the standard living of the Italian households based on poverty and social exclusion. The analysis is developed at the regional level through cross-sections based in the year 2002 and in the year 2003. The indices of social capital that we...

We apply graphical modelling theory to identify fiscal policy shocks in SVAR models of the US economy. Unlike other econometric approaches of which achieve identification by relying on potentially contentious a priori assumptions of graphical modelling is a data based tool. Our results are in...

It has been observed that university professors sometimes become less research active in their mature years. This paper models the decision to become inactive as a utility maximising problem under conditions of uncertainty and derives an age-dependent inactivity condition for the level of...

The extent to which environmental regulatory institutions are either "green" or "brown" impacts not just the intensity of regulation at any moment, but also the incentives for the development of new pollution-control technologies. We set up a strategic model of R&D in which a polluter can deploy...

Numerous studies have examined the effect on credit spreads of renegotiation. These studies have generally focused on the impact on spread levels in general, and not on how renegotiation influences the relative pricing of senior versus junior debt claims. In this paper, we show that the scope...