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...

One of the main functions of public debt is to smooth taxes and spending over time. In the Covid crisis, the Maastricht deficit restrictions were temporarily suspended to allow for large temporary deficits. As recovery sets in, countries are confronted with the task of consolidating the Covid...

The paper compares the impact of corporate taxation and social insurance on foreign direct investment (FDI) and unemployment. Four main results are derived: (i) the optimal size of the welfare state depends on the degree of risk-aversion and the unemployment rate as a measure of labor income...

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...

This paper considers the role of flexicurity when jobs must be reallocated from a declining, traditional sector to a skill intensive expanding sector. Workers initially decide whether to acquire qualifications for skill-intensive tasks or to accept a less demanding traditional job. Unemployment...

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...

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...