The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22...

We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while...

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the...

This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are...

This article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led members of the economic profession, most notably, Barro, 2004 to...

We analyse how changes in international trade integration affect productivity and the functional income distribution. To account for endogeneity, we construct a leave-out measure for international trade integration for country-industry pairs using international input-output tables. First, we...

This paper assesses the empirical relationship between the liberalization of international trade and the economic status of women. Although historically globalization is not generally linked to the advancement of women, several recent country studies find export led growth in middle and low...

How does international trade affect the popularity of governments and leaders? The recent backlash against globalization renders this question extremely topical. Yet, most previous work has looked for political effects of aggregate trade flows without decomposing into particular types of...

We develop a new dynamic factor model that allows us to jointly characterize global macroeconomic and financial cycles and the spillovers between them. The model decomposes macroeconomic cycles into the part driven by global and country-specific macro factors and the part driven by spillovers...