This paper describes important regulation issues that concern microfinance. It starts by considering literature on how and why to regulate and supervise microfinance. Considering the specific case of microfinance in Albania, it analyzes the context of this industry and some particular issues...

The capacity of the Regional Policy of the European Union (EU) to reduce the gap between the core and the periphery of the Union is still controversial. This paper revisits the question by exploiting treatment effect methods with a spatial approach never previ ously applied to the analysis of...

This paper looks at the Cohesion Policy of the European Union (EU) and investigates how the EU agricultural and rural development policies shape its influence on regional growth. The analysis of the drivers of regional growth shows that the EU Regional Policy has a positive and significant...

Cohesion Policy and Common Agricultural Policy are the most highly financed policies within the EU Budget and the most decisive in terms of the territorial distribution of the resources. Although they are extremely interdependent in terms of design and implementation, they are not taken as such...

We show that recent methodological advances in econometric theory raise questions about the results obtained by Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LMF) in relation to the determinants of international investment patterns (International Investment Patterns, The Review of Economics and Statistics 2008; 90(3):...

On BHPS data we measure various indices of social capital at the individual and household level, and use them as explanatory variables in standard consumption insurance tests. We find that two out of three aspects of social capital positively impact on consumption smoothing, by reducing the...

A Survey of Empirical Studies on International Risk Sharing Risk sharing among countries is desirable since it enables economic agents to smooth consumption across time and states of nature, partially or completing offsetting the impact of income shocks on consumption choices. The aim of this...

By means of panel and time series regression analyses, and by resorting to a variance decomposition due to Asdrubali et al. (1996) we show that income flows to and from abroad did not play, in general, a large risk sharing role for a pool of EU countries over the horizon 1976-2007. This is...

We explore the impact of various forms of globalization upon international risk-sharing applying the KOF globalization indices. The empirical literature, so far, has only investigated economic and financial sides of globalization. By decomposing globalization into its economic, social and...

In this paper we extend the macroeconometric model developed in Bagnai (2004) by linking it to a submodel for the Japanese economy, and we utilize this extended model to investigate several hypotheses of reduction in the US twin deficits. The Japanese submodel is specified and estimated along...