Individuals often hold erroneous beliefs about their socio-economic status relative to others. We develop a new machine learning technique to measure these misperceptions and use large-scale international survey data to compute status misperception for 241,757 households from 97 countries (24...

This paper examines how policy affects social expenditures. Analyzing an OECD panel from 1980 to 2003, five political variables are tested: Election- and pre-election years, the ideological party composition of the governments, the number of coalition partners and the fact, if the ruling...

Globalization is blamed for many socio-economic shortcomings. I discuss the consequences of globalization by surveying the empirical globalization literature. My focus is on the KOF indices of globalization (Dreher 2006a and Dreher et al. 2008a), that have been used in more than 100 studies....

This paper re-examines the link between globalization and income inequality. We use data for 140 countries over the period 1970–2014 and employ an IV approach to deal with the endogeneity of globalization measures. We find that the link between globalization and income inequality differs...

A widespread concern is that labor market institutions erode in the course of globalization, which, in turn, decreases employment and wages. By using panel data and crosssectional data, I investigate the influence of globalization on labor market regulation. I use the indicators of labor market...