Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a GDP per capita level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget....

This paper investigates the impact of fiscal policy on profits using panel data for 19 high-income OECD countries during the period 1975-1999. We estimate a profit equation in which profits depend on a set of fiscal variables. Our empirical method is based on a consistent treatment of the...

We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. Starting with the seminal paper of Robert Barro (1990) we show that an understanding of the core results of the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region's lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there has...

We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader's ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime...

While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I re-examine the theories put forward by La...

This paper surveys recent research on decentralization and natural disasters. The first part discusses results from theoretical models that have been used to study the issues that arise when natural disasters occur in a country with more than one level of government. The next section discusses...

Using a natural experiment from Germany, we show that temporary place-based subsidies generate persistent effects on economic density. We identify employment and capital formation as main channels for higher income per square kilometer. As the spatial regression discontinuity design allows us to...