We’re delighted to highlight two of Muhammad Asali upcoming economics papers. Professor Asali has once again proven his international credibility and emphaized the significance of his research in the field.

The first piece, Labor Market Flexibility and Exchange Rate Regimes, co-authored with Kuokstis and Spurga, is soon to be published in the European Journal of Political Economy. The work offers the first evidence about the causal relationship between labor market flexibility and the choice of exchange rate regimes. The analysis identifies that more flexible labor markets are expected to have a higher degree of exchange rate fixity; to adopt fixed (pegged) exchange rate regimes rather than floating exchange rate regimes, or more likely to become part of a currency union. The authors’ results ultimately confirm predictions of the optimum currency area theory.

In the second study, Civil rights experiments versus enrichment experiments in wage gap analysis, forthcoming in Applied Economics Letters, Muhammad addresses the “index number problem” in wage gap analyses. In essence, the wage gap measured is dependent on the assessment type, yet the choice of which method is essentially arbitrary. This paper, however, suggests that this choice should not be arbitrary. The measurement should in fact be consistent with policy aims – specifically the use of “enrichment experiments” within quantity measures, and the “civil rights experiment” measurement approach when considering quality measures.

For further details on each paper see:

https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1esyTe52OrYfU

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SXF8SWDNJ8RFMSUHEQDU/full?target=10.1080/13504851.2022.2056124