This paper investigates the time-varying impacts of international macroeconomic uncertainty shocks. We use a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) specification with drifting coefficients and factor stochastic volatility in the errors to model six economies jointly. The measure of uncertainty is...

Contrary to frequent recommendations of the public finance literature and international institutions, a persistently high tax wedge on labor is observed in Europe. At the same time, the scope for shifting taxes from labor to more growth-friendly revenue sources appears underused in many European...

Spain was not admitted to the then European Economic Community during the Francos regime for political reasons. Joining the EU on January 1986 was the last and final step forward towards the definitive consolidation of democracy in Spain and the consolidation of the opening of the Spanish...

Using panel data spanning 15 years, this paper investigates the persistence and correlates of subjective and consumption poverty in urban Ethiopia. Despite the decline in consumption poverty in recent years, which has been linked to rapid economic growth, subjective poverty has remained largely...

The impact of HIV/AIDS on fertility in sub-Saharan Africa has received attention recently, since changes in population structure can impact on future economic development. We analyze the effect of AIDS on actual and desired fertility in rural Malawi, using data from Malawi 2004 Demographic and...

While a growing literature relates macro variation in corruption to ethnic divisions, existing studies have paid little attention to the possible existence of systematic micro variation in corruption along ethnic lines. The present paper examines whether individual corruption experiences vary...

In light of the empirical evidence on clientelism and ethno-regional favouritism in African politics, the present paper examines the relationship between ethnic divisions and clientelism. Specifically, we ask whether – and what type of – ethnic divisions affect the experiences with,...

Due to rising incidences of natural calamities, governments are lacking capacity to properly protect households living in areas which are prone to disasters like cyclones and associated storm surges. To protect the property damages of the disaster victims, private storm protection activities...

Unlike most studies of subjective well-being in developing countries, we use a fixed effects regression on three rounds of rich panel data to investigate the impact of relative standing on life satisfaction of respondents in urban Ethiopia. We find a consistently large negative impact of...

We use panel data from rural Ethiopia to investigate if participation in a safety net program enhances fertilizer adoption. Using a difference-in-difference estimator and inverse propensity score weighting we find that participation in Ethiopia’s food-for-work program increased fertilizer...