The standard approach to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) holds that as a country develops and GDP per capita grows environmental degradation initially increases but eventually it reaches a turning point where environmental degradation begins to decline. Environmental degradation takes many...

This volume was prepared by Thomas Steinwachs while he was working at the ifo Center for International Economics. It was completed in September 2018 and accepted as a doctoral dissertation by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU). It is a collection of four self-contained...

Understanding the relationship between temperature and economic growth is a critical component in designing optimal climate policies. This paper provides the first study that documents the relationship between daily temperature and total factor productivity (TFP). Using detailed firm-level...

This paper reviews the effect of natural disasters on human mobility or migration. Although there is an increase of natural disasters and migration recently and more patterns to observe, the relationship remains complex. While some authors find that disasters increase migration, others show that...

The sources of economic growth and development have been puzzling economists from the modern dawn of the profession. While the Solow-Swan neo-classical model dominated research on growth in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s saw the emergence of growth theories that disputed, largely on theoretical...

Kahn (2005) found that ethnic heterogeneity reduces the number of deaths caused by natural disasters, a finding that is contrary to theoretical predictions. This paper casts doubt on this finding and uses cross-country data from 1965 to 2008 to conduct a re-estimation. To alleviate omitted...

This paper tests for a sulfur Kuznets curve by examining the sulfur emissions per capita-GDP per capita relationship individually, for 25 OECD countries over 1950-2005 using a reduced-form, linear model that allows for multiple endogenously determined breaks. This approach addresses several...

This study analyzes the role of financial development (FD) on the impact of technological innovation (TI) on six environmental quality indicators for the 25 economies that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for the period from 2000 to 2019. We use a two-step...