In response to the problem of shrinking birthrates in the country, in October 2007, the head of the Georgian Orthodox church announced that he would personally baptize any third and further baby born to Orthodox families from that time. This study uses the initiative as a natural experiment to...

This paper investigates the impact on university enrollment of an unconditional cash transfer in Georgia, designed to help households living below the subsistence level. The program, introduced in 2005, selects recipients based upon a quantitative poverty threshold, which gives us the ability to...

In response to the problem of shrinking birthrates in the country, in October 2007, the head of the Georgian Orthodox church announced that he would personally baptize any third and further baby born to Orthodox families from that time. This study uses the initiative as a natural experiment to...

This study is the first economic experiment that tests the economic significance of the theory of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966). For this purpose, I design an economic experiment in which subjects are asked to express their valuation of two-choice situations. In one case, subjects are...

This research studies the specific determinants of the choice of exchange rate regime in resource-rich countries. We run multinomial logit regressions for an unbalanced panel data set of 145 countries over the 1975-2004 period. We find that resource-rich countries are more likely to adopt a...

In this paper, we define specific (general) human capital in terms of the occupations whose use is spread in a limited (wide) set of industries. We analyze the growth impact of an economy's composition of specific and general human capital, in a model where education and R&D are costly and...

We examine a trivariate time series model that is subject to a regime switch, where the shifts are governed by an unobserved, two-state variable that follows a Markov process. The analysis is performed in a Bayesian framework developed by Albert and Chib (1993), where the unobserved states are...