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on Islamic Finance |
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Issue of 2019‒02‒25
three papers chosen by |
| By: | Couttenier, Mathieu; Hatte, Sophie; Thoenig, Mathias; Vlachos, Stephanos |
| Abstract: | We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%). |
| Keywords: | Immigration; populism; Violent Crimes; Vote |
| JEL: | D72 K42 L82 Z12 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13496&r=all |
| By: | Bulut, Levent; Rizvanoghlu, Islam |
| Abstract: | The literature has not settled down on safe haven property of gold in emerging and developing countries. Therefore, in this study, we revisit the international evidence on hedging and safe haven role of gold for 34 emerging and developing countries with a span of daily data covering January 2000 – November 2018. We employ GARCH-copula approach to estimate lower-tail extreme dependencies of the joint distribution of gold and equity returns. We also introduce a new definition for strong safe haven property of an asset. Our findings indicate that while gold serves as a hedge instrument for all countries in our sample, we got evidence of weak safe haven property for gold, for domestic investors, only in 18 countries, and a strong safe haven asset only in six countries. |
| Keywords: | gold emerging markets copula tail dependence safe haven |
| JEL: | C58 F30 G10 G15 |
| Date: | 2019–01–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:91957&r=all |
| By: | Clemens, Michael A. (Center for Global Development) |
| Abstract: | 'Guest workers' earn higher wages overseas on temporary low-skill employment visas. This wage effect can quantify global inefficiencies in the pure spatial allocation of labor between poorer and richer countries. But rigorous estimates are rare, complicated by migrant self-selection. This paper tests the effects of guest work on Indian applicants to a construction job in the United Arab Emirates, where a crisis exogenously influenced job placement. Guest work raised the return to labor by a factor of four, implying large spatial inefficiency. Short-term effects on households were modest. Effects on information, debt, and later migration were incompatible with systematic fraud. |
| Keywords: | income, human capital, migration, labor, mobility, guest work, India, gulf, construction, worker, selection, migrant, temporary, visa, wage, education, crisis, low-skill, unskilled, credit, exploited, naive, regret, slavery, trafficking, debt, coerced, cheated |
| JEL: | F22 J6 O12 O16 O19 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12095&r=all |