The fight against Islamic State (IS) has been the focus of Western countries' policy towards Syria since late 2014, while the objective of finding a lasting political solution to the conflict has been relegated to the background. This policy focus has manifested as a military counterterrorism...

General Michel Aoun's election to the presidency of the Republic of Lebanon at the end of October has fuelled fears among Syrian refugees in Lebanon that their situation may deteriorate further. Some of them even predict the implementation of a forced-return policy to their homeland. In fact, in...

The objective of this publication is to create a new narrative of these conflicts which sheds light on their local dimensions by looking closely at the social, political, economic and religious transformations produced by the uprisings and the armed conflicts that followed. Only with a good...

One of the most relevant events of the last decades has been the fast integration of international financial markets. As most restrictions to cross-border asset trade were removed, the volume of activity in international financial markets increased dramatically, and so did the cross-country...

The topic of this thesis is decision-making under risk. I focus my analysis on expected utility theory by von Neumann and Morgenstern. I am especially interested in modeling risk attitudes represented by Bernoulli utility functions that belong to the following classes: Constant Absolute Risk...

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This thesis is composed by four independent chapters. Their common denominator is the process of human capital accumulation analyzed under different perspectives and using different techniques. In the following I will shortly describe each chapter in more detail. Chapter 1 addresses an important...

This thesis deals with different topics on international macroeconomics, in particular on business cycles in small open economies, the motives for net foreign asset accumulation and the transmission of shocks in an international framework. The three chapters deal with very different issues and...