Smallholder farms in the humid highlands of East Africa are undergoing changes that question the notion of the rural space. Characterized by land degradation, increasing population pressure, intensive farming and continuous cropping in small plots, smallholder farmers have increasingly embraced...

We examine the effectiveness of the financial sector rescue packages provided by the national governments during the 2008 financial crisis. This study questions the implicit assumption that government interventions have an uniform effect on the default risk of individual banks. After testing the...

We examine the relationship between different dimensions of the political regime in place and human capital using a two-step structural equation model. In the first step, we employ factor analysis on 16 human capital indicators to construct two new human capital measures (basic and advanced...

Until recently, most research on political budget cycles was based on the (often implicit) presumption that these cycles do not differ across countries. However, more recent studies focus on heterogeneity. This paper surveys studies examining the factors conditioning the occurrence and strength...

This paper addresses two empirical questions. Is fiscal policy affected by upcoming elections? If so, do election-motivated fiscal policies enhance the probability of re-election of the incumbent? Employing data for 65 democratic countries over 1975–2005 in a semi-pooled panel model, we find...

Using data for more than 160 countries in the period 1997–2010, we explore the impact of large-scale natural disasters on the distance-to-default of commercial banks. The financial consequences of natural catastrophes may stress and threaten the existence of a bank by adversely affecting their...

We use cross-country data to explore whether temperature and rainfall shocks trigger violent conflict, or not. We include a wide range of country and time samples, and explore whether the impact of weather shocks is conditional on income or political regimes. Our overall conclusion is sobering....

Using data for more than 200 banks from 21 OECD countries for the period 2002–2008, we examine the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk using quantile regressions. In contrast to most previous research, we find that banking regulation and supervision has an effect on the...

We examine the effect of upcoming elections and government ideology on agricultural liberalization in Central and Eastern Europe countries in the post-communist period. Our results suggest first that prices and markets liberalization and land market privatization are manipulated in pre-election...

We examine the effect of political 'institutions' on economic growth volatility, using data from more than 100 countries over the period 1960 to 2005, taking into account various control variables as suggested in previous studies. Our indicator of volatility is the relative standard deviation of...