The current financial turmoil has led many writers in the area of Islamic finance to revive an old edict in Islamic finance – no risk, no gain. I have discussed this axiom in my earlier writings and have not come across anything in recent advocacy of its proponents that could make me change my...

This article narrates Ireland’s recent odyssey from the pride and envy of Europe to kneeling supplicant through the eyes of an econometric model of the government bond market. The exercise suggests that, in essence, two developments triggered and propelled Ireland’s drift towards sovereign...

Which structural reforms affect the speed the regional convergence within a country? We found that domestic financial development, trade/current account openness, better institutional infrastructure, and selected labor market reforms facilitate regional convergence. However, these reforms have...

Local socio-economic cooperation arrangements can contribute to the development of adequate solutions which can compensate the negative impacts of globalization. One of the specific areas is agriculture. Capital-intensive technology is the key element in the competitiveness and viability of...

This paper presents an integrated framework for assessing systemic risk. The framework models banks’ capital asset ratios as a function of future losses and credit growth using a generalized method of moments to calibrate shocks to credit quality and credit growth. The analysis is...

The study examines the different aspects of labor in the rural household economy. It identifies the factors that significantly determine the rural households' labor allocation decisions. Moreover, it also looks at how the availability and growth of rural nonagricultural employment opportunities...

The article evaluates the contribution of inequality of opportunity to earnings inequality in Egypt and analyzes its evolution across three time periods and different population groups. It provides parametric and nonparametric estimates of a lower bound for the degree of inequality of...

This paper analyzes and quantifies the idea of model risk in the environment of internal model building. We define various types of model risk including estimation risk, model risk in distribution and model risk in functional form. By the quantification of these concepts we analyze the impact of...

We examine the risks to bank soundness associated with credit booms in a large set of countries. Using bank-level data in 90 countries between 1995 and 2005, we analyze the relationship between credit growth and bank soundness taking into account the potential two-way causality. We find that,...

This paper investigates economic, political, and institutional constraints to fiscal policy implementation in sub-saharan Africa. We find that planned fiscal adjustments or expansions are less likely to be implemented the larger they are, the more inaccurate the growth forecasts they are based...