Our friend and colleague Rüdiger Dornbusch passed away before he was able to complete his book based on the Munich Lectures in Economics that he gave in November 17, 1998, at the Center for Economic Studies of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. The lectures contain a fascinating overview of the...

In OECD countries watching television is by far the most time-consuming form of leisure. Surprisingly, television viewing is positively correlated with work hours across countries. A simple model based on the notion of aggregate strategic complementarities in social leisure is developed which...

We examine multinational' optimal entry modes into foreign markets as a function of market size, FDI fixed costs, tariffs and transport costs. Our results highlight why large countries are more likely to attract acquisition investment, while intermediate-sized countries may be served...

The residence-based taxation of interest income in the EU faces the difficulty that taxpayers may evade taxation by holding bank accounts in other countries. The EU therefore makes considerable efforts to achieve cooperation among EU member states in order to improve tax enforcement. The present...

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Some countries especially in continental Europe exhibit a corporatist politicoeconomic equilibrium with a sustantial protection of insiders on...

When types of workers are imperfect substitutes, the Mincerian rate to return to human capital is negatively related to the supply of human capital. We work out a simple model for the joint evolution of output and wage dispersion. We estimate this model using cross-country panel data on GDP and...

This paper reviews the relationship between natural resources and economic growth, and stresses how natural capital tends to crowd out foreign capital, social capital, human capital, and physical capital, thereby impeding economic growth across countries and presumably also over time....

This paper examines the pattern of foreign direct investment (FDI) in producer services. We develop a model of FDI in these services and test its predictions using panel data on U.S. FDI in 25 host countries from 1976 to 1995. We find evidence that, in addition to governmental and cultural...

Limited liability and asymmetric information between an investment bank and its lenders provide an incentive for a bank to undercapitalise and finance overly risky business projects. To counter this market failure, national governments have imposed solvency constraints on banks. However, these...