Some recent empirical studies deny any direct performance effects of measures of geography and conclude that institutions trump all other potential determinants of development. For given effects of institutional quality, our empirical results indicate quantitatively important direct negative...

The activities of multinational enterprises drive the economic globalization process to a very large degree. This paper lists some facts about their dominant role in all channels of globalization. Therefore, the importance of multinational enterprises in foreign direct investment and production...

This paper brings forward a three-country model to analyze the internationalization process in the age of globalization. It is shown that investment of one company increases not only the incentive to invest in another country for every national competitor but for third country's companies as...

We investigate whether firms' "global engagement", either in the form of exporting or opening up affiliates abroad, is related to the change in their management performance. We use new and unique data from a recent large scale firm survey of management practices in Germany. We calculate...

Der Beitrag analysiert die internationalen Produktionsverlagerungen und Investitionsverflechtungen in der Automobilindustrie, um die These zu überprüfen, dass es selbst bei der Herstellung relativ wissensund technologieintensiver Güter zu einem nachdrängenden Wettbewerb aus Ländern mit...

It is a widely held belief that foreign direct investment (FDI) has a positive effect on economic growth. We test this hypothesis by performing convergence regressions derived from a model of endogenous technological change. We estimate the rate of growth in per-capita income, relative to the...

Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the...

The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) has been widely used to analyze climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. The storylines behind these scenarios outline alternative development pathways, which have been the base for climate research and other studies at global,...