This note describes how research on the link between globalization and openness has changed over time. Early contributions assumed that countries develop welfare states to compensate for volatility caused by economic openness (the compensation hypothesis). Recent findings have cast doubts on...

The research project WWWforEurope undertakes to lie the theoretical and empirical foundations for the embarkment on a new socio-ecological growth path in Europe. The new path underlines the need to guarantee Welfare as a broad universal principle for its population, assuring economic and social...

We derive four sets of counterfactual national interest rate paths for the 17 Euro Area countries for the time period 1999 to 2012. They approximate desirable national interest rates countries would have liked to implement if they could still conduct independent monetary policy. We find that...

We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country's Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861-1901 period. We...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

The paper focuses on the recent pattern of government expenditure for developing countries and estimates the determinants which may have influenced government expenditure. Using a panel data set for 111 developing countries from 1984 to 2004, this study finds evidence that political and...

Labor and product market regulations affect the unemployment rate of a country without doubt. Econometricians, however, have yet to establish an unequivocal significance of this impact. Model mis-specification, one of the main underlying problems, is overcome by adopting a Bayesian Model...

Economic institutions determine prospects for growth and development. This paper examines necessary conditions for an economy to support institutions that implement markets. Agents differ in land holdings, skill, and power. A competitive market assigns land to the skilled, not necessarily to the...

Isolated effects of labor and product market institutions as well as the interaction between both aforementioned categories on unemployment have been extensively discussed in the empirical literature. However, interaction effects between individual labor market institutions have been widely...

This paper examines several mainstream explanations of the financial crisis and stagnation and the role they attribute to income inequality. Those explanations are contrasted with a structural Keynesian explanation. The role of income inequality differs substantially, giving rise to different...