The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the...

This paper investigates the effects of inward FDI on per-capita income and growth of the US states since the mid-1970s. Using a Markov chain approach, it shows that both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of FDI affect per-capita income and growth. Employment-intensive FDI,...

Night lights could be a valuable proxy of economic activity at the subnational level when GDP data are lacking or of poor quality. Supplementing Henderson et al.’s (2012) analysis at the national level, we assess the stability of the elasticity of GDP with regard to night lights across regions...

Hours per capita measures based on the private sector as usually included in the set of observables for estimating macroeconomic models are affected by low-frequent demographic trends and sectoral shifts that cannot be explained by standard models. Further, model-based output gap estimates are...

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...

We propose a simple modification of Hamilton’s (2018) time series filter that yields reliable and economically meaningful real-time output gap estimates. The original filter relies on 8 quarter ahead forecast errors of a simple autoregression of real GDP. While this approach yields a cyclical...

Diese Anmerkung zeigt, dass das reale Bruttoinlandsprodukt der Bundesrepublik Deutschland einem trendstationären Prozess folgt. Dabei werden sowohl ökonometrische Tests, bei denen die Trendstationarität die Alternativhypothese ist, eingesetzt als auch solche, bei denen sie die Nullhypothese...

One key focus of the on-going debate on the integration of international financial markets have been measures to lengthen the maturity of foreign debt. Short-term debt is typically considered to be volatile and thus a potential trigger of currency crises. In contrast to the vivid policy debate...

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) is likely to give a further boost to trade and capital flows, yet empirical evidence on the possible magnitudes is still scarce. This paper uses four different datasets to estimate the determinants of international asset holdings and trade...