We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and...

Can historical institutions affect today's firm innovation? We analyze a historical experiment in 1902, when the foreign-run Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMC), known for its efficient and transparent governance, took over some of the notoriously corrupt Chinese Native Custom stations and...

This paper studies drivers of high-frequency (daily) dynamics of the South African rand vis-à-vis the dollar from January 2001 to July 2007. We find strong nonlinear effects of commodity prices, perceived country and emerging market risk premium and changes in the dollar-euro exchange rate on...

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...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

This paper develops a new open-economy endogenous growth model where technology diffusion allows for a stable and non-degenerate world income distribution. In accordance with the empirical literature, I find that country characteristics such as the social infrastructure, the degree of openness,...

This paper examines the relationship between international migration and source country fertility. The impact of international migration on source country fertility may have a number of causes, including a transfer of destination countries’ fertility norms and an incentive to acquire more...

In this paper, we apply a convex hull approach to counterfactual analysis of trade openness and growth. The experiments we choose evaluate the importance of trade openness for growth across African countries. Specifically, we ask the question what would happen if African countries were more...

The empirical evidence currently available in the literature regarding the effects of a country's IMF program participation on its output growth is rather mixed. To shed new evidence on this issue, in this paper we specify a state-dependent panel data model accounting in particular for program...

We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer...