This paper presents evidence on a national-level electricity ladder which sees countries transition toward coal and natural gas, and finally nuclear power and modern renewables such as wind power, for their electricity needs as they develop. The extent to which countries climb the electricity...

Throughout the post-war period Greece has faced a unique, and unfavourable, situation consisting of: (i) a perimetric location away from major European markets; and (ii) distorted economic relations as its northern borders were designed to be real barriers to communication and trade with...

There is controversy about whether geography matters mainly because of its contemporaneous impact on economic outcomes or because of its interaction with historical events. Looking at terrain ruggedness, we are able to estimate the importance of these two channels. Because rugged terrain hinders...

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent...

The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...

Economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries. Four main channels of transmission from abundant natural resources to stunted economic development are discussed: (a) the Dutch disease, (b) rent seeking, (c) overconfidence,...

This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas -- the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) -- at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to several...

This paper uses high- and low-impact citation indicators for the evaluation of the citation performance of research units at different aggregate levels. To solve the problem of the assignment of individual articles to multiple sub-fields, it follows a multiplicative strategy according to which...

This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when...

In many datasets, articles are classified into sub-fields through the journals in which they have been published. The problem is that many journals are assigned to a single sub-field, but many others are assigned to several sub-fields. This paper discusses a multiplicative and a fractional...