Despite being a fixture of everyday life in the Arab world, wasta, which may be thought of as special influence by members of the same group or tribe, has received little attention from social scientists. Our casual empiricism suggests that wasta is an important determinant of how economic...

Women in Muslim countries lag way behind their counterparts in non-Muslim countries in terms of participation in the labor force. Among many explanations as to why this is the case, religion, in particular, is stated to bear the responsibility. However, a vast amount of research shows that...

In this article we study the relationship between workers' remittances and fertility rate of the remittance receiving country. We identify two main channels by which remittances transfers affect fertility. First, migrants may adopt and later transmit to the household the ideas, values and...

While remittances from the GCC countries to Asia slowed down during the crisis, there is no evidence of large decreases. On the other hand, remittances to several MENA countries decreased during 2009, but the evidence for 2010 suggests a reversal of this pattern. Most of the recent labour...

We examine the effect of remittance outflows on inflation in the remitting countries. The growth of remittance outflows depresses inflation rate.