In this paper, we decompose body mass index (BMI) differences between Turkish immigrants and Germans in West Germany for women and men. We focus on isolating the part of BMI differences that can be explained by differences in observed socioeconomic status from the part attributable to...

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 revisit and extend the study by Chordia et al. (2014) which documents that, in recent years, increased liquidity has significantly decreased exploitable returns of capital market anomalies in the US. Using a novel international dataset of arbitrage portfolio returns for four well-known...

This paper proposes a quantile regression estimator for a heterogeneous panel model with lagged dependent variables and interactive effects. The paper adopts the Common Correlated Effects (CCE) approach proposed by Pesaran (2006) and Chudik and Pesaran (2015) and demonstrates that the extension...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic literature, and heights are related with vitamin D. Although African-Americans and whites have the genetic ability to reach similar terminal statures, 19th century blacks were consistently shorter...

Using a source of 19th century US state prison records, this study addresses European-American stature variation. The most commonly cited sources for stature variation are diets, disease, and work effort. However, vitamin D is also vital in human statures and health. This paper demonstrates that...

Gravity as both fact and theory is one of the great success stories of recent research on international trade, and has featured prominently in the policy debate over Brexit. We first review the facts, noting the overwhelming evidence that trade tends to fall with distance. We then introduce some...

We consider a new dataset that provides a description of the population of financial equity flows between developed countries from 2001 to 2018. We follow the standard practice of controlling for pull and push factors as well as gravity-style variables, while also accounting for the business...

We analyze the migration drivers within the European Union countries. For a set of 23 EU countries over the 1995-2019 period, we use Bayesian Model Averaging and quantile regression to assess notably the relevance of unemployment and earnings. We find that the existence of a common border...

This research estimates the impact of climate on European agriculture using a continental scale Ricardian analysis. Climate, soil, geography and regional socio-economic variables are matched with farm level data from 37,612 farms across Western Europe. We demonstrate that a median quantile...