High levels of social capital, by fostering cooperation and coordination, have direct implications for the intensity of collective action problems in a society. While it has been shown that high levels of social capital facilitate the implementation of institutional reforms we argue that the...

We argue from a conceptual and empirical point of view that tax-rate elasticities of foreign direct investment (FDI) to Central and East European Countries (CEECs) derived from statutory tax rates (STRs) are likely to be flawed. STRs are problematic measures of tax burden as they capture neither...

We study empirically how the development of financial systems influences the magnitude of output growth fluctuations in a sample of OECD countries between 1995 and 2005. While the development of banking sectors is not significantly related to the magnitude of macroeconomic fluctuations,...

Using the Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) model due to Engle (2002), we estimate time-varying correlations of quarterly real GDP growth among the G7 countries. In general, we find that rather heterogeneous patterns of international synchronization exist during US recessions. During the...