The East-West gap in the German population is believed to originate from migrants escaping the socialist regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We use newly collected regional data and the combination of a regression discontinuity design in space with a difference-in-differences...

This paper employs a pair-wise approach to examine regional integration in the US gasoline market. Using gasoline price data at the state level over a period of more than two decades, we find strong support for the view that the law of one price holds in regional markets, as more than 80% of...

Can infrastructure investment win "hearts and minds"? We analyze a famous case in the early stages of dictatorship - the building of the motorway network in Nazi Germany. The Autobahn was one of the most important projects of the Hitler government. It was intended to reduce unemployment, and was...

This paper examines the issue of the Greek public debt from different perspectives. We provide a historical discussion of the accumulation of Greece's public debt since the 1960s and the role of public debt in the recent crisis. We show that the austerity imposed since 2010 has been unsuccessful...

Until the German invasion of Norway 9 April 1940 the Norwegian central bank had been one of the most independent in Western Europe. This article investigates the agency of the Norwegian central bank during the German occupation and compares it with central banks in other German occupied...

We use the Economic Freedom Index (Gwartney, Lawson and Norton 2008) to characterise the institutions of ancient Athens in the fourth century BCE. It has been shown that ancient Greece witness improved living conditions for an extended period of time. Athens in the classical period appears to...

In Classical Athens, being at war was much more common than peace. The military expenditures were correspondingly large. The real enigmatic issue, however, is not financial but where they found the manpower needed for this policy. The number of warships (triremes) was so great that there is no...

Following the 1978 economic reforms, China gradually became first amongst developing countries and the second in the world, after the USA, in terms of stock of inward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Sustained GDP growth, a high rate of capital return and brisk economic development made China...

Thailand has experienced steady economic growth and structural changes in the economy in the last four decades that enabled her to gain a position among the newly industrialized nations. The structural changes associated with economic growth reflect the changing role of agriculture in the...

This paper examines changes in regional inequality in India in the 1990s, using data for 59 of India's 78 agro-climatic regions from the National Sample Survey. It extends the work of Singh et al. (2003) in two ways. First, it allows for differences in baseline growth performance across...