Ökonomen und Politiker gehen heute nicht mehr von einer schnellen Angleichung der wirtschaftlichen Leistungsfähigkeit zwischen Ost- und Westdeutschland aus. In der Tat zeigen viele aktuelle Studien, dass regionalökonomische Unterschiede sehr persistent, also kaum veränderbar sind. Dieser...

The notion of the 'Silk Road' that the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen invented in the 19th century has lost attraction to scholars in light of large amounts of new evidence and new approaches. The handbook suggests new conceptual and methodological tools for researching ancient...

Piracy in international waters is on the rise again, in particular off the coast of Somalia. While the dynamic game between pirates, ship-owners, insurance firms and the military seems to have reached some kind of equilibrium, piracy risks generating significant negative externalities to third...

This paper analyzes the relationship between unexplained racial/ethnic wage differentials on the one hand and social network segregation, as measured by inbreeding homophily, on the other hand. Our analysis is based on both U.S. and Estonian surveys, supplemented with Estonian telephone...

A standard object of empirical analysis in labor economics is a modified Mincer wage function in which an individual's log wage is a function of education, experience, and race. We analyze this approach in a context where individuals live and work in different locations (thus facing different...

This paper provides an overview of poverty in North America. In it we look at the three countries of North America, Mexico, the US, and to a lesser extent Canada and attempt to both describe poverty as it exists in the three countries and explore some of the correlates of poverty. In doing so,...

In this paper, I follow the development of the classification scheme discussions closely through its formative decade, from the last years of the 1890s through about 1913, by which time three revealing publications close the prewar developments: the United States Immigration Commission's massive...

This paper proposes a method to decompose earnings inequality into a component due to unequal opportunities and a residual term. Drawing on the distinction between 'circumstance' and 'effort' variables in John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, we associate inequality of opportunities...

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique is widely used to identify and quantify the separate contributions of group differences in measurable characteristics, such as education, experience, marital status, and geographical differences to racial and gender gaps in outcomes. The technique...

This paper examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972-2006. While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s. There have been large changes in the level of happiness...