We analyze the impact of earthquakes on nighttime lights at a sub-national level, i.e. on grids of different size. We argue that existing studies on the impact of natural disasters on economic development have several important limitations, both at the level of the outcome variable – usually...

We study the effect of spatial inequality on economic activity. Given that the relationship is highly simultaneous in nature, we use exogenous variation in geographic features to construct an instrument for spatial inequality, which is independent from any man-made factors. Inequality measures...

We study the effect of spatial inequality on economic activity. Given that the relationship is highly simultaneous in nature, we use exogenous variation in geographic features to construct an instrument for spatial inequality, which is independent from any man-made factors. Inequality measures...

We study how natural-resource rents affect the risk of internal conflict within countries and how the federal structure of countries influences this relationship. Natural-resource abundance may induce excessive rent-seeking and thus increase the risk of internal conflict. Fiscal and political...

The objective of this paper is to analyze whether successful environmental policies spread across geographical space. We examine the existence of such environmental spatial policy spillovers using the example of wastewater treatment in Mexican municipalities. Untreated wastewater is a key...

This paper empirically studies the impact of decentralization on foreign aid effectiveness. For this purpose, we examine a commonly used empirical growth model, considering aid modality as well as different measures of political and fiscal decentralization. Our panel estimations reveal that...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the quality of political institutions on the link between central bank independence and inflation. Making use of data on the evolution of central bank independence over time and controlling for possible nonlinearities, we employ interaction models to...

The majority of theoretical and empirical studies on the relationship between decentralization and corruption argues that the devolution of power might be a feasible instrument to keep corruption at bay. We argue that this result crucially depends on the effectiveness of monitoring bureaucrat's...

This paper examines whether the federal structure of aid-receiving countries matters in explaining aid effectiveness. Following the decentralization theorem, the devolution of powers should increase aid effectiveness, since local decision-makers are better informed about local needs. At the same...

This paper studies the impact of decentralization on the shadow economy. We argue that decentralization may decrease the size of the shadow economy mainly through two transmission channels: (1) Decentralization enhancing public sector efficiency (efficiency effect), and (2) decentralization...