Scholars have been active in investigating causes and consequences of austerity policies. We examine how economists use the term “austerity” in scientific studies and measure austerity in empirical analyses. The sample includes around 3,500 journal articles published in the top 400 journals...

Many economies are concerned with the future security of electricity supply. This is rooted in the necessity to decarbonise energy systems and in the nuclear phase-out. Hence, some economies, instead of investing in own domestic energy capacity, rely on energy production by their neighbours. At...

This paper develops a two-country model of intraindustry trade with trade costs, which can be reduced by public investment in an international infrastructure capital, the stock of which accumulates over time. Depending on the trade costs and international distribution of manufacturing firms,...

We study the impacts of public investment, notably in construction and in R&D on economic growth and of crowding-out effects on private investment. For this purpose, we use Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) models and the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) approach for 40 advanced and emerging...

We look at a part of the spatial angle of economic growth. We introduce a new measure Spatial Population Concentration (SPC) that captures the weighted average population surrounding every person within a geographic area. The weights are a function of the distance between the person in question...

Since the 1980s inflationary pressures seem to materialize overproportionately outside of the sectors of consumer goods and services. We combine the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices with indices for asset prices, such as stocks and real estate, as well as the costs of public goods to develop...

Twelve percent of the Malawian population is HIV infected. Eighteen percent of sexual encounters are casual. A condom is used a third of the time. To analyze the Malawian epidemic, a choice-theoretic general equilibrium search model is constructed. In the developed framework, people select...

The importance of the prehistoric migration of anatomically modern humans from Africa for comparative economic development has been the focus of a vibrant research agenda in the past decade. This influential literature has attracted the attention of some scholars from other disciplines, and in...

The purpose of this research study has been to expand our understanding of the finance-growth ‘nexus’ to finance-growth-inequality ‘nexus’ in the presence of both the formal and the informal sources of borrowing. Using empirical evidence of IHDS Survey data for two rounds the study...

We show how major shareholders can exploit their power over international organizations to hide their foreign-policy interventions from domestic audiences. We argue that major powers exert influence bilaterally when domestic audiences view the intervention favorably. When domestic audiences are...