Throughout the world, strong dispersions of both regional and national unemployment rates can be observed. The economic theory has developed various explanations on how this differences occur. Corresponding models mainly aim at institutional and political framework, insider effects, efficiency...

This paper investigates the major drivers of governmental redistribution. We retest the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis and account for a plethora of political, institutional, and cultural forces that influence the scope of redistribution. Extended and harmonized data on effective redistribution...

Evidence from a current panel of harmonized worldwide data highlights a robust negative effect of income inequality on economic growth that we trace back to its transmission channels. Less equal societies tend to have less educated populations and higher fertility rates, but not necessarily...

This paper investigates the causes of the "vanishing effect of finance" detected in recent studies. The results highlight that the negative effect of the financial system on growth is mainly driven by advanced economies, whereas finance is still beneficial for income increases in developing...

Die gegenwärtige Ruhe in der Eurozone trügt. Der Euro steht weiter auf der Kippe. Das Machtwort von Mario Draghi hat nichts gelöst. Die Dreifach-Krise - Banken-, Staatsschulden- und Wettbewerbskrise - schwelt weiter. Das Grundübel der Währungsunion ist multiples 'moral hazard'....

This paper explores the determinants of stagflation. Three measures are proposed that gauge both the occurrence and the strength of stagflation. We investigate the empirical determinants of these measures, accounting for a range of theoretical hypotheses that have been discussed since the...

Does the financial sector contribute to economic growth? While most of the studies carried out before the Financial crisis tend to answer the question with 'yes', recent empirical work provides evidence that the opposite is true. We study these new findings in detail, applying GMM and 3SLS...

Die Einkommens- und Vermögensverteilung hatte sich in Deutschland vor dem Beginn der Finanzkrise zunehmend ungleich entwickelt, seitdem aber ist die Ungleichheit zurückgegangen. Ob Ökonomen beurteilen können und sollen, was eine "richtige und gerechte" Einkommensverteilung ist, bleibt...

We empirically study the effects of culture and diversity on government redistribution based on a large sample of countries. To disentangle culture from institutions, our analysis employs regional instruments as well as data on the prevalence of the pathogen Toxoplasma Gondii, linguistic...

We compile data for 186 countries (1919 - 2016) and apply different aggregation methods to create new democracy indices. We observe that most of the available aggregation techniques produce indices that are often too favorable for autocratic regimes and too unfavorable for democratic regimes....