During the 90s the increase in health spending which compared to the overall growth had taken place at a rather rapid pace experienced a worldwide slow-down. In relation to overall economic growth and the expansion of other countries' health care systems, Austria's system grew below average- a...

This paper evaluates the impact of economic and legal variables on wage differentials between men and women. Since Becker (1957) economists have argued that competitive markets eliminate discrimination in the long run. On the other hand, practically all countries have enacted some sort of law...

This paper proposes a strategy to increase the efficiency of forecast combination. Given the availability of a wide range of forecasts for the same variable of interest, our goal is to apply combining methods to a restricted set of models. To this aim, a hierarchical procedure based on an...

The Kyoto Protocol's success or failure should be evaluated against the unobserved counterfactual of no treatment. This requires instrumental variables. We find that countries' membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC) predicts Kyoto ratification in a panel model. Both multilateral...

Does higher income cause democracy? Accounting for the dynamic nature and highpersistence of income and democracy, we find a statistically significant positive relationbetween income and democracy for a postwar period sample of up to 150 countries. Ourresults are robust across different model...

Many Kyoto countries fear a loss of competitiveness due to unilateral climate policyefforts; policymakers therefore call for carbon-related border tax adjustments. With thispaper we attempt to estimate the treatment effect of Kyoto commitment on bilateralexport flows using regression-adjusted...

In an attempt to disentangle the impact of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures on trade patterns, we estimate a Heckman selection model on the HS4 disaggregated level of trade. We find that aggregated SPS measures constitute barriers to agricultural and food trade consistently to all...