Climate change is a phenomenon leading to randomly distributed disasters around the globe. Due to massive economic and technical asymmetry between the advanced North and the developing South efficient climate and industrial policy is particular difficult. Globally efficient policy would need to...

This contribution is motivated by two stylized observations, the slowdown in growth, and a simultaneous income polarization in many advanced economies. While mainstream neoclassical and endogenous growth theory cannot sufficiently explain the nexus, we argue that the demand side plays a role. We...

Success in international trade depends, amongst other things, on distance from markets. Most new economic geography models focus on the distance between countries. In contrast much less theorizing and empirical analysis have focused on how distances within a country for instance due to the...

Concerns about the duration of China's growth and hence the question of a permanent significant contribution of China to world economic growth relate, amongst other things, to the problem of reducing regional disparity in China. While China's high average growth is driven by a small number of...

A stylized fact of economic development is the structural transformation of countries from traditional, mainly agricultural societies to modern economies dominated by manufacturing and services. In this paper we provide an endogenous growth model to illuminate the role of entrepreneurial...

Start-ups of new firms are important for economic growth. However, start-up rates differ significantly between countries and within regions of the same country. A large empirical literature studies the reasons for this and attempts to identify the regional determinants of start-ups. In contrast,...

As the time of leaving school determines the level of academic achievement this timing decision is central for the human capital investment decision. Real option theory offers a new perspective of the human capital investment decision under uncertainty and irreversibility. Unlike other...