The effect of income inequality on savings and consumption has remained an open empirical issue despite several decades of research. Results obtained in this study indicate that income inequality and private consumption are both I(1) nonstationary variables that are cointegrated, and inequality...

A recent paper (Bove and Elia (2017)) argues that migrants' diversity, as captured by the indexes of both fractionalization and polarization, exerts a posive effect on GDP growth. In fact, by using the same dataset and method- ology, it can easily be shown that the impact of diversity cannot be...

The economic consequences of migration have become the topic of many recent contributions in theoretical and applied economics. However, only a handful of papers have dealt with the implications of migration for risk sharing. We intend to fill in this gap in the literature by exploring the...

This paper looks at interest rate developments in the US and argues that long-term real interest rates are at lows not seen in the past 50 years. It explores competing hypotheses that there is a global saving glut, there is conundrum or that global capital formation has slowed. The dominant view...

The current debate on financial inclusion pays little attention to whether financial inclusion is pro-cyclical with the fluctuating business cycle. This article investigates the relationship between financial inclusion and the business cycle. The findings reveal that the level of savings and the...

In many applications of habit persistence to macroeconomics, it is of little significance whether habits are internal or external. In this paper, it is shown that the distinction between internal and external habits is important in a situation wherein a shock is news about the future. An...

Raising real interest rates has been cited as a way to increase private saving, and thus provide the resources for growth. But this may not be a viable approach in the poorest developing countries in which most people live at subsistence level. In these situations, consumption is not very...