This paper studies the effects of bilateral foreign aid on conflict escalation and de-escalation. We make three major contributions. First, we combine data on civil wars with data on low level conflicts in a new ordinal measure capturing the two-sided and multifaceted nature of conflict. Second,...

Climate policy negotiations identi ed international technology funding as a means of achieving carbon emissions reductions in developing countries. Such funds are now being realized. This paper is probably the first theory-based discussion of international technology funding. It sets up a Ramsey...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...

Successful economic development is usually characterized by two salient phenomena: industrialization and demographic transition. Chronologically both events happen so closely to each other that historians and economists alike suspect that they are interrelated. This paper develops a theory for...

This paper analyses the effects of discretionary fiscal policy by presenting new empirical evidence for Germany within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. Following Blanchard and Perotti (2002), the SVAR model is identified by applying institutional information. We find no...