Today more than half of the 7 billion inhabitants of the planet live in urban areas, with this share expected to keep rising. Whereas in developed countries urbanisation has been a long and slow process, in developing countries this process is now characterised by a really fast pace and a high...

Earlier literature on economic growth models identified Africa specific determinates of economic growth. In standard models of economic growth Africa dummies were significant. A more resent strand of literature attributes the significance of Africa dummies to inappropriate estimation techniques....

We analyse an endogenous growth model with pollution and abatement. Human capital is used in the production sector as well as in pollution control. We show that greener preferences may increase the pollution level, driven by the decrease in human capital intensity in the production sector and...

Gender-based discrimination is a pervasive and costly phenomenon. To a greater or lesser extent, all economies present a gender wage gap, associated with lower female labor force participation rates and higher fertility. This paper presents a growth model where saving, fertility and labor market...

We study the relationship between height stature and child mortality in West Africa. This is motivated by two things: understanding the determinants of height, widely used health indicator, and explaining the « double African paradox ». This paradox comes from the fact that Africans are...

It has long been known that the city-size distributions are fat tailed, drawing the interest of urban economists. In contrast, not much is known about the distribution of GDP at city level (henceforth referred to as gross metropolitan product, GMP). We build a model of the spatial economy that...

This paper shows that increased volatility of Örm-level productivity can push the nominal interest rate to its lower bound with large amplification effects on macroeconomic aggregates. The framework combines a simple canonical Önancial accelerator model, time varying risk shocks, and a zero...

We examine the dynamic effects and empirical role of TFP news shocks in the context of frictions in financial markets. We document two new facts using VAR methods which provide robust evidence on the importance credit spreads for the propagation of news shocks. A DSGE model with financial...

How does bankruptcy affect the dynamics of aggregate consumption? We quantify the trade-off between the insurance and creditworthiness effects of bankruptcy in response to tighter credit. We show that bankruptcy dampens the effect of tighter credit on aggregate consumption on impact because it...

The main directions on which channeled the FSA (Financial Surveillance Authority) the activity in Romania in 2014 were the development of non-bank financial markets and their contribution to economic growth. In this article we propose an analysis of how it has evolved the private pensions market...