The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...

This paper examines the impact of labour and product market reforms on economic growth in 25 OECD countries between 1985 and 2013, and tests whether this impact is conditioned by the fiscal policy stance, i.e. whether there are fiscal expansions or adjustments. Our local projection results...

The Green Paradox states that, in the absence of a tax on CO2 emissions, subsidizing a renewable backstop such as solar or wind energy brings forward the date at which fossil fuels become exhausted and consequently global warming is aggravated. We shed light on this issue by solving a model of...

A rapidly rising carbon tax leads to faster extraction of fossil fuels and accelerates global warming. We analyze how general equilibrium effects operating through the international capital market affect this Green Paradox. In a two-region, two-period world with identical homothetic preferences...

Using the measures proposed by Mink et al. (2012), we reexamine the coherence of business cycles in the euro area using a long sample period. We also analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business cycle coherence and examine whether our measures for business cycle coherence indicate a...

This paper investigates the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on gambling activity in China. Based on a theoretical model, we hypothesize that EPU increases the demand for hope which raises the willingness to pay for lottery tickets, resulting in higher lottery sales. We estimate a...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth. However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a "red herring" once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while the value of...