What is the long run impact on development from differences in subsistence strategies during pre-industrial times? Whereas this question has been explored from the point of view of agriculture, remarkably little attention has been paid to the complementary strategy of relying on marine...

Migration and trade are often linked through ethnic networks boosting bilateral trade. This study uses migration to quantify the importance of Ricardian technology differences for international trade. The framework provides the first panel estimates connecting country-industry productivity and...

Usually, studies analyzing terrorism focus on the total number of casualties or attacks in a given county. However, per capita rates of terrorism are more likely to matter for individual welfare. Analyzing 214 countries from 1970 - 2014, we show that three stylized findings are overturned in...

We review the aid effectiveness literature to assess whether foreign aid given to areas of limited statehood can be expected to promote economic and social outcomes in the recipient country. We distinguish different types of aid, motives for granting it, recipient country policies and...

We introduce the revised version of the KOF Globalisation Index, a composite index measuring globalization for every country in the world along the economic, social and political dimension. The original index was introduced by Dreher (2006) and updated in Dreher et al. (2008). This second...

How globalisation influences social expenditure has been examined for industrialized countries. Globalisation has often been shown to be positively associated with social expenditure in established industrialized countries, a finding that corroborates the compensation hypothesis. Scholars have...

This paper considers the distribution of output and productive factors among members of a fully integrated economy (FIE). We demonstrate that each member's shares of total output and of total factors will be equal. This implies that growth in shares is random. If output and factor shares evolve...

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy...

This paper explores official trade data to identify patterns of smuggling in international trade. Our main measure of interest is the difference in matched partner trade statistics, i.e., the extent to which the recorded export value in the source country deviates from the reported import value...

China's growth strategy as set out in the 11th 5-year plan in 2005 called for upgrading of product quality, the development of an innovation society, and reduced reliance on foreign intellectual property with high license fees. Consistent with this policy, China has been involved in recent years...