Social protection can be defined as interventions intended to assist individuals, households, and communities in managing risk in order to reduce vulnerability, smooth consumption, and improve equity. Social protection in Togo has been put to test by the political and economic developments of...

The World Bank is financing an increasing number of community-based social services projects. The objective of this paper is to review and categorize the extent, scope and mechanisms of these projects in the current Bank portfolio, and to identify good practices and potential pitfalls. The...

This paper reexamines foreign currency markets for evidence of fractional integration, and extends the extant literature in several important dimensions. First, we utilize a new semiparametric wavelet-based estimator, which is far superior to the more prevalent GPH estimator on the basis of mean...

We use a very general bivariate GARCH-M model and quarterly data for five Asian countries to test for the impact of real and nominal macroeconomic uncertainty on in°ation and output growth. We conclude the following. First, in the majority of countries uncertainty regarding the output growth...

This paper examines the effects of inflation uncertainty on real economic activity by utilizing a flexible, dynamic, multivariate framework that accommodates possible interaction between the conditional means and variances. The empirical model is based on a familiar identified vector...

This study examines price discovery among the two most prominent price benchmarks in the market for crude oil, WTI sweet crude and Brent sweet crude. Using data on the most active futures contracts measured at the one-second frequency, we find that WTI maintains a dominant role in price...

Previous research shows that volatility in oil prices has tended to depress output, as measured by nonresidential investment and GDP. This is interpreted as evidence in support of the theory of real options in capital budgeting decisions, which predicts that uncertainty about, for example,...