In this paper, I investigate whether the numerous debt relief initiatives during the 1990s have had a significant effect on economic growth rates in developing countries. The major initiatives during that time period were negotiated as bilateral agreements under the guidance of the Paris Club of...

We study the channels of interstate risk sharing in Germany for the time period 1970 to 2006 following the methodology of Asdrubali et al. (1996). Their framework allows us to estimate the degree of smoothing of a shock to a state's gross domestic product by factor markets, the government...

We provide empirical estimates of the risk-sharing and redistributive properties of the German federal fiscal system based on data from 1970 until 2006, with special attention to the effects of German unification. We find that tax revenue sharing between the states and the federal government and...

This paper finds that factors determined outside of a country are more closely related to the global bank loans she receives. These loans are more stable when global banks are less competitive and have a higher presence in the recipient country. We obtain our results by using data on the...

Analyzing US economic and foreign aid data from 1967 to 2007, this paper investigates whether adverse economic and financial conditions are negatively linked to official development assistance (ODA). It finds empirical evidence that US ODA has tended to decline as its economic conditions worsen....

Consumer theory still maximizes utility subject to a budget constraint, when in fact 2008 data show that consumer debt is 130% of disposable income. Granger-causality tests confirm Consumption precedence over income. We discuss several features of newer US data, such as the ability to start...

In the U.S., mortgage interest deductibility provides a financial incentive for home ownership over renting as well as an incentive to "over-consume" housing since houses are not fungible. Home-ownership is also often promoted as a safe means of wealth creation. We construct and calibrate a...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are characterized by liberalization with respect to only a few partners and thus they can potentially clash with, and retard multilateral trade liberalization (MTL). Yet there is almost no systematic evidence on whether the numerous existing PTAs actually...

In this paper we explore the performance of Experience Weighted Attraction (EWA) in two different auction institutions: First Price Sealed Bid, and Becker-DeGroot-Marschak. Our results suggest that learning has some promise as a possible explanation for previously documented cross- institutional...