Return migration exerts wide-ranging influence upon the countries of origin of the migrants. We analyze whether returnees adjust their fertility choices to match the norms which prevail in their previous countries of destinations, using Egyptian household-level data. Egyptians migrate...

We explore in this paper cubature formulas over the space of functions having a first continuous derivative, i.e., C^1. We show that known cubature formulas are not optimal in this case and explain what is the origin of the loss of optimality and how to construct optimal ones; to illustrate we...

This article analyzes the "escape from competition effect" in a step-by-step framework in which a succesful firm may either leapfrog the previous leader or catch-up its technology. Innovation and growth are affected by both the intensity of competition and the probability of leapfrogging.

We use a two-sector neoclassical open economy model with traded and non-traded goods to investigate both the aggregate and the sectoral effects of temporary fiscal shocks. One central finding is that both sectoral capital intensities and labor supply elasticity matter in determining the response...

A captive is an insurance or reinsurance company established by a parent group to finance its own risks. Captives mix internal risk pooling between the business units of the parent group and risk transfer toward the reinsurance market. We analyze captives from an optimal insurance contract...

In this paper we consider a Lagrange Multiplier-type test (LM) to detect change in the mean of time series with heteroskedasticity of unknown form. We derive the limiting distribution under the null, and prove the consistency of the test against the alternative of either an abrupt or smooth...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality and unemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to the same externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal and informal firms have monopoly...

While the effects of an ad's colour on attitudes towards it have already been investigated, far less work has been done on the influence of incongruous colours. This paper examines the effects of an ad using an incongruous colour on several variables of the advertising persuasion process....

In this paper we consider a Lagrange Multiplier-type test (LM) to detect change in the mean of time series with heteroskedasticity of unknown form. We derive the limiting distribution under the null, and prove the consistency of the test against the alternative of either an abrupt or smooth...

We study a class of robust, or worst case scenario, optimal control problems for jump diffusions. The scenario is represented by a probability measure equivalent to the initial probability law. We show that if there exists a control that annihilates the noise coefficients in the state equation...