I construct a theory of foreign interventions in which the preferences of the foreign country over alternative local groups are determined by each group's international economic ties. In equilibrium, the foreign country supports the group with which it has the strongest ties, since this is most...

We examine whether changes of government influence compliance with international agreements. We investigate compliance with the NATO two percent target to which all NATO countries committed themselves during the NATO summit in Wales in 2014. The dataset includes the military expenditure by NATO...

In most Western economies, the flourishing of the Welfare State has coincided with a decline of the role of the family: divorce has been introduced, and the number of marriages has decreased. We suggest that a taboo against divorce was part of the informal safety net in a period when social...

I show how the influences of unskilled immigration, differential fertility between immigrants and the local indigenous population, and incentives for investment in human capital combine to predict the decline of the West. In particular, indigenous low-skilled workers lose from unskilled...

We construct an asymmetri c duopolistic R&D and production behavior model subject to knowledge spillovers. This model is an extension to the symmetric model of d'Aspremont and Jacquemin (A&J (1988)) and aims to determine the cooperative and non-cooperative R&D strategies for two agents of...

Does access to information and communication technologies (ICT) increase innovation? We examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of BITNET across U.S. universities in the 1980s. BITNET, an early version of the Internet, enabled e-mail-based knowledge exchange and collaboration...

Adopting disruptive technologies for decarbonizing hard-to-abate industrial sectors requires experimentation through demonstration (pilot) projects. However, from an economic perspective, the potential long-term benefits and the difficulties in designing relevant public policies are not...

European empires had two key economic aspects: the extraction of colonial wealth by colonizers, and the relevance of trade for the colonial economies. I build a simple model of decolonization that puts these two elements at centre stage. By controlling policy in the colony, the mother country...