Volume 20, Issue 1

This paper investigates a neglected reason underlying the low female labor participation rates in Egypt: husbands’ opposition. We find that opposition falls with increasing levels of educational attainment and chronological age of the husband. Age at first marriage, religious affiliation, wealth, and the extent to which a husband upholds traditional views regarding the participation of women in the labor market and gender equality in general were not significant. We also report an inverse relationship between the likelihood of husband’s opposition and the number of children in the household, which suggests that financial considerations may outstrip normative considerations.

This research sheds light on the relationships between heuristic biases and investment decisions as demonstrated by Saudi investors by establishing a mediating role for investor overconfidence in the relationship between anchoring heuristics and investment decision-making. The first to present evidence for this role, the study takes into account specific types of investment decisions – i.e. decisions to buy, sell, and engage in frequent trading. Based on a sample of 598 responses, empirical evidence is presented to show that anchoring directly increases the extent to which investment decisions are irrational and also does so indirectly through its impact on overconfidence. Given that this is the case, investors would be well-advised to critically assess the influence on their investment decision-making of overconfidence, which may, in turn, be rooted in deep-seated biases such as anchoring. Further, the potential moderating effect of trading frequency on overconfidence and investment decisions is examined and a moderated mediation model presented to elucidate the relationship between anchoring bias and investment decisions. The findings underscore the importance of understanding these biases and taking a scientific approach to trading, including by engaging in infrequent trading, to producing more rational investment decisions. Put differently, the study highlights the benefit of infrequent over frequent trading: Compared to those who trade less frequently, investors who trade more frequently are more susceptible to overconfidence and anchoring biases.

The crucial role of financial systems in sustainable development has become the center of global and national interest and development strategies, and more developed and stable financial systems are the cornerstone for development finance and achieving the sustainable development goals. This research aims to examine the impact of financial development and stability on human development firstly in a sample of 185 countries worldwide, and secondly in a sample of 21 MENA countries, over the period 1990–2019. This study adopts the Panel Data Econometrics (Fixed Effects and Random Effects Methods) and proxy for human development by exploiting the UNDP’s Human Development Index and its three subindices (Education, Income, and Life expectancy), while it adopts broad money, credit to the domestic private sector, and banking sector deposits (all as a percentage of GDP) to proxy for financial development. Moreover, it represents financial stability by the banking sector Z -score and a dummy variable representing crises. The empirical results reveal the prevailing role of development and stability in the financial systems on human development and its three subcomponents, regardless of the country’s economic development level.

This paper investigates the impact of workers’ remittance inflows on inflation in Lebanon. The data used is monthly data spanning the period from December 2007 to May 2019. I estimate a structural vector autoregressive model using 24 monthly lags and find that a one-time remittance growth shock leads to a statistically significant increase in the inflation rate in the short run in Lebanon. Also, the results show that a remittance growth shock makes a considerable contribution to the forecast error variance for the inflation rate in Lebanon.