In the last decades the number of refugees from conflict regions in Africa increased dramatically. West Africa is the cradle of migration from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, were most African migrants with overseas destinations live. The European Union shares dual responsibility for the...

We draw on a new data set on the use of Swiss francs and other currencies by European banks to assess the patterns of foreign currency bank lending. We show that the patterns differ sharply across foreign currencies. The Swiss franc is used predominantly for lending to residents, especially...

Improved living conditions in Africa would lessen migratory pressure on Europe. The scope of Germany‘s "Marshall Plan with Africa" is too narrow; progress can only be made if Europe works together. A financial system that reaches as many people as possible could be one key to future...

About five decades the Franc CFA - Zone in Western and Central Africa was praised as incarnation of economic and political stability in Africa, backed by France. But free convertibility and fixed parity, guaranteed by the French Treasury, mainly served the interest of a small elite of the...

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) generated an unprecedented public contestation across Europe. In this paper, we focus on the sources of such backlash in European public opinion. Previous studies of this issue have analysed opinions on free trade and the specific...

The evolution of the EU supervisory architecture has demonstrated that it took the risk of a euro break-up to barely overcome the Member States and their supervisors' political resistances to centralisation. In the two-tier Europe that is emerging after the euro crisis, the integrity of the...

This companion paper to Chatelain and Ralf (2012), 'Spurious regressions with near-multicollinearity' put their results into the contexts of the history of statistics, of the current publication bias in applied sciences and of the substantive versus statistical significance debate. This article...

We examine the interaction between foreign aid and binding borrowing constraint for a recipient country. We also analyze how these two instruments affect economic growth via non-linear relationships. First of all, we develop a two-country, two-period trade-theoretic model to develop testable...

A major shortcoming of the theoretical literature on international transfers is that it is not at all clear whether the welfare results obtained are consistent with transfers flowing from rich to poor nations. This is because economists hardly ever model the difference in wealth between the...

This paper examines the welfare effects of international income transfers in a two-country, two-good model with transboundary pollution. Most existing studies have assumed that pollution negatively affects the consumer's utility function instead of influencing production. In our model, there is...