Even though the automobile industry is technologically advanced, the increasing integration of low-income countries into the global division of labor has put competitive pressure on traditional automobile producing countries. New end-producers emerged in Asia, Latin America as well as Southern...

Conclusive evidence supporting the widely held view that developing countries should draw on foreign direct investment (FDI) to spur economic development is surprisingly hard to come by. We raise the proposition that results on the growth impact of FDI are ambiguous because highly aggregated FDI...

This paper aims at overcoming several shortcomings of previous empirical studies on the relationship between IPR protection and FDI. First, FDI is analyzed on a sectorally and regionally disaggregated level. Second, we address the proposition that stronger IPR protection raises not only the...

We identify measures of shocks to total factor productivity and preferences from two real business cycle models and subject them to Granger causality tests to see whether they can be considered exogenous to other plausible sources of the German business cycle. For the period 60.i to 89.iv no...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. To this end, we set up a small-scale macroeconomic model of a dual economy to capture the transmission mechanisms through which the deregulation of product and...

The labour markets in the developed countries have experienced two fundamental changes in recent years. Firstly, high-skilled workers have gained at the expense of low-skilled workers, which manifests itself in a rising skill premium and/or a rising disparity in the unemployment rates of these...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. Applying inequality indices and Fields' (2001) decomposition methodology to Bolivian household survey data of the years 1989 to 1997, we identify recent trends...

The regional allocation of aid within recipient countries has been largely ignored in the aid allocation literature. We use geocoded data on the location of aid projects financed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank within a sample of 27 recipient countries to assess the claim of...

We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973-2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and - less robustly - commercial motives matter. When we relate geo-strategic and commercial motives to the political...

Development assistance has been criticized for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from closer coordination of aid activities. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional...