This paper addresses the relationship between the level of violence and the opium market in Afghanistan's provinces. We first provide an overview of the nature and extent of the Afghan drug trafficking. This is followed by a vector autoregressive analysis of the nexus opium-insurgency activities...

The relationship between trade and foreign-policy goals has led to growing debates in the field of international economics and international relations. Most studies are cross-national and use interstate disputes to proxy the national security interests. We focus on the U.S., the world’s...

We explore the geo-strategic determinants of bilateral trade flows between the USA and the rest of the world. We develop a three-party model of security and trade patterns and use data on military assistance and troop deployments over the 1950–2009 period to validate its predictions. We find...

We explore the supply side of peacekeeping – the determinants of a country’s voluntary contributions to peacekeeping operations. We focus on troop contribution and examine a large set of operations, from UN-led missions to operations led by NATO, the African Union, the European...

This paper provides an answer to the question of whether Europe will be able to reach its tertiary education target by 2020. Insights into the dynamics of future education attainment and areas for effective policy interventions in the long-run are highlighted. We model the dynamics behind...

This paper presents estimates of the own-wage elasticity for undeclared labour demand and calculates the effects of undeclared work on declared wages of various skill levels. To identify the parameters of interest, we exploit a quasiexperimental setting created by three tax amnesty laws brought...

By easing restrictions on the use of short-term contracts, the 30/2003 act represents contemporaneously the more extensive and the more radical policy aimed at introducing flexibility in the Italian labour market. By virtue of a difference-in-differences estimator, the paper provides an estimate...

We analyze how different policy interventions may incentive the transition of workers from the informal to the formal sector. We use Italian data over the period 1998-2008 to evaluate ex post whether the 2003 Italian labor market reform was able to reach the objective to reduce the share of...

In this paper we explore the impact of the insurgency and military deployment on the livelihoods of the local communities in Afghanistan. We use monthly wages and commodity prices at the provincial level over the period 2003-2009 and look for their response to conflict events and ISAF...