This paper provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of the relation between the cyclicality of fiscal policy, output volatility, and economic growth, using a large cross-section of 88 countries over the period 1960 to 2004. Identification of the effects of (endogenous) cyclical fiscal...

In 1998 Rüdiger Dornbusch gave the Munich Lectures in Economics entitled “International Financial Crises”. The CES Academic Council awarded him the prize and title “Distinguished CES Fellow” for his outstanding work on the monetary theory of foreign trade.Rüdiger Dornbusch passed away...

This is the first study that assesses the economic effects of direct democratic institutions on a cross country basis. Its results are based on up to six new measures produced to reflect the legislative basis for using direct democratic institutions as well as their factual use. In addition, a...

A primary means of bureaucratic oversight is consumer complaints. Yet, this important control mechanism has received very little attention in the literature on corruption. I study a model of corruption with incomplete information in which consumers require a government service from officials who...

It is not immediately clear how to discount distant-future events, like climate change, when the distant-future discount rate itself is uncertain. The so-called “Weitzman-Gollier puzzle” is the fact that two seemingly symmetric and equally plausible ways of dealing with uncertain future...

In this paper, we reconsider the debate on Weitzman's (1998) suggestion to discount the long-run future at the lowest possible rate, referring to Gollier (2004) and Hepburn & Groom (2007). We show that, while Weitzman's use of the present value approach may indeed seem questionable, its outcome,...

The efficient rate of return of a zero-coupon bond with maturity <i>t</i> is determined by our expectations about the mean (+), variance (-) and skewness (+) of the growth of aggregate consumption between 0 and <i>t</i>. The shape of the yield curve is thus determined by how these moments vary with <i>t</i>. We...

In many countries environmental policies and regulations are implemented to improve environmental quality and thus individuals’ well-being. However, how do individuals value the environment? In this paper, we review the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) representing a new non-market valuation...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

We show that ambiguity aversion increases the value of a statistical life as soon as the marginal utility of wealth is higher if alive than dead. The intuition is that ambiguity aversion has a similar effect as an increase in the perceived baseline mortality risk, and thus operates as the...