Investigating the Impact of Chinese Financing on Productivity in the African Continent
By Kedest Mathewos Given that productivity is a key component of long-term economic growth and that China has become an important source of external financing in Africa, this study aims to investigate the impact of Chinese foreign direct investment and government-to-government loans on productivity. Using a panel of the top fourteen African recipients of […]
The Impact of Microfinance on Women’s Empowerment: Evidence from Rural Areas of Uganda
By Sonia Maria Hernandez Microfinance is the practice of extending small collateral-free loans to underserved populations in developing areas with no access to credit. The Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) randomized access to microfinance treatment for women in rural areas of Uganda and tracked outcomes through surveys. This research determines the impact of microfinance […]
The Future of Economic Geopolitics: Network Effects in Intercultural Trade
By Joshua Curtis Using a regression discontinuity design on a gravity model of trade among 36 Middle Eastern and East Asian countries between 1980 and 2014, this study demonstrates network effects in trade. A small improvement in trade between subsets of two cultural blocs diminishes the effect of cultural similarity on trade between all members […]
The Impact of a Fixed Exchange Rate Regime on Growth and Volatility in an Oil-‐‑dependent Economy
By Shihab Osman Malik and Faisal Bandar Alsaadi This study examines the relationship between the fixed exchange rate regime, economic growth, and output volatility in oil-‐‑producing Saudi Arabia over the post-‐‑Bretton Woods period (1973–2016). We assess the implications of the current exchange rate regime on macroeconomic and growth performance, and evaluate its sustainability in the […]
What Fosters Innovation? A CrossSectional Panel Approach to Assessing the Impact of Cross Border Investment and Globalization on Patenting Across Global Economies
By Michael Dessau and Nicholas Vega This study considers the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on innovation in high income, uppermiddle income and lowermiddle income countries. Innovation matters because it is a critical factor for economic growth. In a panel setting, this study assesses the degree to which FDI functions as a vehicle for […]
The Investment Cost of Currency Crises in Emerging Markets: An Empirical Treatment from 1994-2015
By Eric Ramoutar Currency crises – large and sudden depreciations in the value of a country’s currency – have been an unfortunate by-product of increased financial openness over the last half century. This study extends the already vast literature on the impact of currency crises by estimating how currency crises affect domestic investment in emerging […]
Video Game Sales: Does Diversity Pay?
By Hai Lin “Helena” Wu The video game industry has grown into a mature market in the past decade, surpassing the size of the U.S. film industry in 2009. As a result of the rise in popularity of video gaming amongst many demographic groups of the American population, the underrepresentation of female and ethnic minorities […]
Fiscal Multicointegration and Sustainability in OECD Economics
By Rajlakshmi De Policies surrounding government expenditures and revenues are often concerned with the size of the national public debt and whether it is sustainable or unsustainable by employing the multi-cointegration framework and assertion corresponding criteria for sustainability. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Portugal, and Austria are found to exhibit sustainable fiscal policies during the […]
Fundamental Volatility’s Eect on Asset Volatility
by Evan Beard Abstract This paper examines the effect of macroeconomic variable volatility on implied and realized asset price level volatilities in the U.S. using monthly data from 1986 – 2008. Two approaches are taken: An autoregressive distributed lag model using rolling standard deviations and a GARCH model. The S&P 500’s volatility is used as […]
Property Rights and Growth: a Matter of Extremes
by Joshua Kazdin Abstract This text explores the impact of property rights on economic growth by analyzing pooled cross-section ratings of property rights in 120 countries across a 35 year period. Empirical results are couched within a theoretical model that incorporates institutions into a general production function, adding property rights as an idiosyncratic shock. A […]
