Die vorliegende Studie wurde im Arbeitsbereich Branchenforschung erstellt und im Juli 2008 abgeschlossen. Auftraggeber war der Bundesverband der Deutschen Gießerei-Industrie (BDG). Koordiniert wurde die Zusammenarbeit von Heiko Lickfett, Chefvolkswirt des Verbandes. Das ifo Institut für...

In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

It has long been argued that the implementation of market-based environmental policy instruments such as environmentally-related taxes and tradable permits is likely to lead to greater technological innovation than more direct forms of regulation such as technology-based standards. One of the...

Using data from more than 100 economies for the period of 1975 to 2005, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis of the determinants of international reserve holdings. Four groups of determinants, namely, traditional macro variables, financial variables, institutional variables, and dummy...