This paper analyzes whether hosting the most prestigious European cultural event, the European Capital of Culture, has an impact on regional economic development or the life satisfaction of the local population. Concerning the economic impact, we show that European Capitals are hosted in regions...

This paper compares the different multi-level climate and energy governance in China, the European Union and the United States. While many comparisons across these three economies exist, they concentrate on comparing the climate and energy “policy instruments” and their results. This paper...

The Swedish employment rate is high in an international comparison and has been rising during recent decades. This pattern is especially pronounced among the elderly and women and reflects labour supply behaviour in these groups. The policy survey in this report suggests that the main drivers of...

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the Balassa- Samuelson effect. But looking back fifty years, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is often assumed...

While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I develop an empirical strategy that...

Several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough. We try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure, using alternative measures of both...

This research argues that deep-rooted factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a signifcant effect on the course of economic development from the dawn of human civilization to the contemporary era. It advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the...

This paper empirically tests the predictions of the Malthusian theory with respect to both population dynamics and income per capita stagnation in the pre-Industrial Revolution era. The theory suggests that improvements in technology during this period generated only temporary gains in income...

This paper analyzes the influence of the shadow economy on corruption and vice versa. We hypothesize that corruption and shadow economy are substitutes in high income countries while they are complements in low income countries. The hypotheses are tested for a crosssection of 120 countries and a...

Europe's industrial base needs to undergo a swift and persistent transformation towards carbon neutrality and circularity, but this transition must happen in a fair and socially just manner. In this working paper, we evaluate the support mechanisms for heavy industry which have been put in place...