We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

Recent studies have found that resource-rich low-income countries are better off investing their resource revenues domestically rather than saving them abroad in a sovereign wealth fund (SWF). This paper finds an optimal rule-based policy of accumulating public capital and its associated public...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional performance calculated using data on the provision of different areas of public services. In order to address...

We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a...

In this paper we study the dynamics of local employment growth in West Germany from 1980 to 2001. Using dynamic panel techniques, we analyse the timing of the impact of diversity and specialisation, as well as of the human capital structure of local industries. Diversity has a positive effect on...

After the end of World War II in 1945, millions of refugees arrived in what in 1949 became the Federal Republic of Germany. We examine their effect on today's productivity, wages, income, rents, education, and population density at the municipality level. Our identification strategy is based on...

What is the right balance among policy interventions in order to ensure economic growth over the long run when an epidemic causes heavy mortality among young adults? We argue that, in general, policies to combat the disease and promote education must be concentrated, in certain ways, on some...

Among the many concerns over globalization is that as nations compete for mobile firms, they will relax labour standards as a method of lowering costs and attracting investment. Using spatial estimation on panel data for 148 developing countries over 18 years, we find that the labour standards...