This paper investigates the changing nature of economic integration in China. Specifically, we consider business-cycle synchronization (correlation of demand and supply shocks) among Chinese provinces during the period 1955-2007. We find that the symmetry of supply shocks has declined after the...

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

We use four ways of the European Social Survey, covering 2000 to 2008, to analyze the effect of religion on happiness. Our findings confirm that religious individuals are generally happier than non-religious ones. When we seek to disentangle the effects of belonging to an organized religion from...

We investigate the relationship between unemployment and growth in China. We find considerable differences in the nature of this relationship across Chinese regions. We argue that this may reflect the different progress in transition across regions, in line with the Aghion-Blanchard model of...

We investigate the short-term effects of fiscal adjustment on economic activity in 20 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009. We compare two approaches: the traditional approach based on changes in cyclically adjusted primary balance (CAPB) and the narrative approach based on historical records....

We revisit the relationship between financial development and economic growth in a panel of 52 middle income countries over the 1980-2008 period, using pooled mean group estimator in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting. We show that financial development does not have a linear positive...

Ramey (2011a) and others argue that increases in government spending associated with wars and military build-ups constitute a good instrument for measuring the macroeconomic effects of fiscal shocks. We argue that this instrument has two important drawbacks: the composition of government...

We explore the role of the transfers that UK regions received from the European structural and cohesion funds, as well as other economic and social factors, in determining the support for the Remain vote in the Brexit referendum. We .nd that past European transfers have played virtually no role...

We study the causal effect of maternal education on childhood immunization rates. We use the Compulsory Education Law (CEL) of 1997, and the differentiation in its implementation across regions, as instruments for schooling of young mothers in Turkey. The CEL increased the compulsory years of...

The vast literature on the effects of immigration on wages and employment is plagued by likely endogeneity and aggregation biases. Ours is among the first papers to address both of these issues by means of causality analysis and by accounting for human capital endowments. Our analysis confirms...