How do government policies and institutions affect stock market performance? As stock markets grow broader and deeper in African countries, the question becomes more critical. Government quality dynamics of corruption-control, government-effectiveness, political-stability or no violence, voice &...

Recent distressing trends in climate change, population explosion and deforestation inspired this paper, which completes existing literature by providing empirical justification to hypothetical initiatives on the impact of population growth on forest sustainability in Africa. Using three...

With the spectre of the Euro crisis looming substantially large and scaring potential monetary unions, this study is a short-run trip to embryonic African monetary zones to assess the Schumpeterian thesis for positive spillovers of financial services on growth. Causality analysis is performed...

The dominance of English common-law countries in prospects for financial development in the legal-origins debate has been debunked by recent findings. Using exchange rate regimes and economic/monetary integration oriented hypotheses, this paper proposes an “inflation uncertainty theory” in...

This paper examines how domestic, foreign, private and public investments affect income-inequality through financial intermediary dynamics. With the exception of financial allocation efficiency, financial channels of depth and activity are good for the poor as they diminish estimated household...

This paper assesses if legal origin explains domestic, foreign, private and public investments through financial intermediary channels of depth, efficiency, activity and size. The findings show that legal origin matters in the finance-investment nexus, though its ability to explain aggregate...

This paper assesses how legal origin influences financial development through regulation quality and the rule of law. It employs all the dimensions identified by the Financial Development and Structure Database of the World Bank. The law channels are instrumented with legal origins to account...

This paper proposes and empirically validates four theories of why legal origin influences growth and welfare through finance. It is a natural extension of “Law and finance: why does legal origin matter?” by Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine (2003). We find only partial...

Purpose – Natural disasters may inflict significant damage upon international financial markets. The purpose of this study is to investigate if any contagion effect occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis....

Financial integration among economies has the benefit of improving allocation efficiency and diversifying risk. However the recent global financial crisis, considered as the worst since the Great Depression has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its...