This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

This research exploits novel evidence on current and historical inequality dynamics, as well as an instrumental variable (IV) strategy (founded on historical settler mortality à la Acemoglu et al.), to document the fundamental role of income redistribution through taxes and transfers in...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an impression of the beginning of deglobalization, although in reality it was pseudo deglobalization. It manifested itself in the turbulence of globalization processes. Russia's war in Ukraine and Western economic sanctions against Russia have created a...

World Pensions Council cofounders Vincent Bazi and M. Nicolas J. Firzli analyse the rise of natural gas as a new asset class for pension and sovereign fund stakeholders in light of the geo-institutional dynamics underpinning asset allocation and investment decisions in an era of macroeconomic...

Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature on volunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life's discontinuities (life event shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static (cross-sectional) data. To reduce...

Forced displacement, including refugee flows, is a global phenomenon. As of 2018, 26 million people were refugees. Financing from the international community makes a significant contribution to supporting refugees and host communities. But in order to meet those needs effectively and...

Rising tensions in the Yellow Sea, a festering ‘Migrant Crisis' in Europe and Africa and resurgent antagonisms in the Persian Gulf are further threatening the Post-War social contract bequeathed by President Truman, Gen. Marshall and Gen. Eisenhower: praetorian Midwestern pragmatists whose...

We investigate the implications of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) for interstate confl ict. We set up a two-stage game with three competing importers, where fi rst, two of the countries decide on whether to initiate war against each other, and subsequently, all three countries select their...

Transition countries are short on both trust in people and trust in government. Scarcity and corruption meant that ordinary citizens had to use informal connections to accomplish everyday tasks. Ordinary people also regularly had to make extra quot;giftquot; payments to doctors and government...