This article discusses the role that local currency bond markets (LCBMs) can play in the long-term financing of sustainable development of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies, and presents an empirical analysis of the factors which may hinder or promote the development of such markets in SSA. Using a new dataset for 27 SSA countries, our findings support earlier research on SSA and other region…

Why should developing countries buy expensive catastrophe (CAT) insurance? Abstracting from risk aversion or hedging motives, we find that insurance may have a catalytic role on external finance. Such effect is particularly strong in those low- to middle-income countries that face financial constraints when hit by a shock or in its anticipation. Insurance makes defaults less likely, thereby rel…

We evaluate the benefits and costs of indexing multilateral loans to variables related to developing countries� ability to pay; i.e. whether a reform of multilateral lending is feasible and economically justified. The analysis covers 40 International Development Association (IDA) countries from 1990 to 2010 and focuses on three types of debt: GDP-indexed loans; export-indexed loans; inflat…

This article develops a theoretical framework to analyse options for financing infrastructure in developing countries. We build a basic model that gives motivations for using a combination of public finance, private debt, and private equity. The model is then extended in a number of ways to examine factors that are important for developing countries. We focus in particular on key institutional…

In this double issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy we publish a set of papers concerned with the mobilization of domestic and foreign capital in support of the United Nations� Sustainable Development Goals that were launched in September 2015. The papers were originally presented at a conference on �Financing for Development� organized by the International Monetary Fund…

We investigate the determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in a historical perspective with a focus on the influence of family structure. We capture the latter with two indicators: residential habits (nuclear versus complex families) and inheritance rules (partition versus primogeniture). After controlling for economic, institutional, religious, and cultural factors, we find that ove…

There is a strong consensus in the experimental literature according to which women are more risk averse than men. However, new evidence reveals that only a tiny fraction of the replications of the Holt and Laury (2002) risk elicitation task displays gender differences. This striking distance between the consensus and the data gathered with this elicitation method provides a clean test of the p…

Why do entrepreneurship rates differ so markedly by gender? Using data from a large representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent personality traits, human capital, and the employment history influence the start-up decision and can explain the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Applying a decomposition analysis, we observe that the higher risk aversion among women explains …

This article uses European Central Bank (ECB) survey data to assess whether gender matters in the small firms� financial structure and access to credit. Firms owned or managed by women (female firms) use smaller amounts and less heterogeneous sources of external finance than their male counterparts. According to statistical evidence, female firms have difficulty in accessing bank finance:…

There is evidence that age matters in politics. In this article we study whether implementation of affirmative action policies on gender can generate additional effects on an alternative dimension of representation, namely, the age of politicians. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in candidate lists for local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not all munic…