China and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This paper explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China (and vice versa). To do so, we build a new geocoded dataset of Indian...

The European Unions's task of providing Trans-European Networks (TENs) in transportation, communications and energy transmission which has been enacted by the treaty of Maastricht, is not confined to internal networks in the EU. Since 1994 this task has been widened so as to give support to the...

In dem Beitrag wird die Infrastrukturausstattung der neuen Bundesländer vorwiegend auf Grund einer Auswertung vorhandener Fachliteratur untersucht. Der Zustand der Infrastruktur in Ostdeutschland zum Zeitpunkt der Vereinigung 1990 war bekanntermaßen sehr schlecht. Der nach mehr als...

Governments may draft contracts with market agents for allocating subsidies and pursuing specific policy goals. Contract enforcement via binding commitments is difficult, however, when exogenous (environmental) and endogenous (behavioural) risks interact. Analyzing the old debt compromise in...

Mit der Entscheidung des Bundesverfassungsgerichts zum Länderfinanzausgleich steht auch die Berücksichtigung der Seehafenlasten der Küstenländer auf dem Prüfstand. Ökonomische Erwägungen sprechen dafür, die Belastungen dieser Länder durch Investitionen in die Hafeninfrastruktur künftig...

Against the backdrop of increasing efforts of the German federal and states’ governments to open up additional private financial sources for transport infrastucture construction this paper tries to give a comprehensive overview over transport-related public expenditures and revenues of the...

The paper analyses the perspectives for a new container port at the German North Sea coast. In view of the expected further enlargement of container ship sizes and sustained growth in international trade, the port seems to be an economically sound project. Public funds, however, will probably...

This paper shows that regional policies can decrease populist support. We focus on the "development objective" (Objective-1) of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), meant to support lagging-behind regions. For causal inference, we exploit three sources of quasi-exogenous variation in a...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that...

We draw on a new data set on the use of Swiss francs and other currencies by European banks to assess the patterns of foreign currency bank lending. We show that the patterns differ sharply across foreign currencies. The Swiss franc is used predominantly for lending to residents, especially...