Contagion across Eurozone’s sovereign spreads and the Core-Periphery divide

This paper investigates the causes of disproportionate increases of sovereign yields with respect to the interest rate on the 10 years German Bund within the Eurozone. Empirical evidence drawn from the Bank for International Settlements dataset on banks’ portfolios shows that rapid financial integration, following the launch of the monetary union, resulted in excess exposure of Core countries’ banks in the Peripheral countries’ financial assets. In order to endogenize the possibility of contagion effects, we conduct econometric estimates through a Global Vector Autoregressive model, where each country’s spread depends upon all Eurozone countries’ spreads. Results show that after the burst of the financial crisis the Core countries’ sovereign yields are essentially determined by the international risk aversion, whereas the spreads of Peripheral countries mainly depend on fundamentals, namely the public debt/GDP ratio and the Real Effective Exchange Rate values with respect to the Eurozone average. These results are supported by the estimate of an impulse response analysis. Macroeconomic failures in public finances and competitiveness seem to originate the exceptional increases in sovereign spreads of the Periphery, through a contagion effect which is limited to this group of Eurozone countries.     

Community conversations as a strategy to change harmful traditional practices against women

This article conducts a series of list experiments to detect whether community conversations contribute to a change in thinking about harmful traditional practices in Ethiopia. While our findings are mixed, we provide evidence that community conversations are indeed a valuable instrument to induce a change in social values in order to empower women.     

The Contribution of Longitudinal Research to the Study of Women's Poverty

Quality &; Quantity - The aim of this article is to discuss some of the central conceptual and methodological issues which must be tackled if we wish to investigate poverty in a gender-sensitive...     

Mandatory IFRS adoption: the trade-off between accrual-based and real earnings management

This paper examines whether firms substituted real earnings management for accrual-based earnings management after the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) became mandatory. Using a sample of 101,331 firm-year observations from 33 countries between 2000 and 2010, we show that IFRS adoption came with the unintended consequence of certain firms substituting real earnings management for accrual-based earnings management, especially among firms in countries with strict enforcement regimes. Furthermore, we document that the trade-off is confined to EU countries in which strong firm-level characteristics (i.e. the firm-level mechanism of control, the market’s level of scrutiny, and firm-specific incentives to provide transparency) are coupled with strong enforcement. We also show that IFRS had an effect in countries outside the EU, albeit at a different time. Overall, the results suggest that accounting regulators’ efforts to increase earnings quality might have had the unintended consequence of increasing real earnings management activities.     

Does Tax Evasion Affect Economic Crime?*

This paper examines the effect of tax evasion on criminal activities in Italy. Specifically, we consider three types of crime that are related to economic determinants: property crimes (including robbery, theft and car theft), fraud and usury. We estimate different econometric models using annual data from the Italian provinces (NUTS-3 level) for the 2004–12 period. We find that tax evasion positively affects economic crimes, and our results suggest that tax evasion is an incentive to engage in criminal activities, in addition to more standard determinants that we include in the analysis, such as labour market opportunities and deterrence. Moreover, these crimes demonstrate different levels of persistence over time and reflect different adjustment costs.