The Demographic and Health Surveys from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Malawi reveal that a significant proportion of HIV infections in adolescent women occurred in women who claim to be virgin. Two possible conclusions arise from this observation: adolescent women misreport sexual status or non-sexual...

Argentina is the only country in the world that was 'developed' in 1900 and 'developing' in 2000. Although various underlying reasons have been identified (chiefly political instability, financial development, inflation, trade openness, and international financial integration), no study has...

Losing a parent is a trauma that has consequences for human capital formation. Does it matter at what age this trauma occurs? Using longitudinal data from the Kagera region in Tanzania that span thirteen years from 1991-2004, we find considerable impact heterogeneity across age at bereavement,...

Are there negative health effects from losing the job? We analyze the causal effect of job displacement on diabetes incidence and prevalence. Type 2 diabetes is an illness that is directly affected by lifestyle factors and psychosocial stress, and with severe side-effects deteriorating the...

This paper investigates determinants of agricultural sector efficiency in ten new member states (NMS-10) of the European Union (EU) from Central and Eastern European countries by the non-parametric method Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the panel data analysis. The agricultural sector...

This study investigates the effects of an R&D subsidy scheme on participating firms net R&D investment. Making use of a specific policy design in Belgium that explicitly distinguishes between research and development grants, we estimate direct and cross-scheme effects on research versus...

Energy supply in Germany has undergone considerable changes during the last decade, of which especially the nuclear phase-out and enormous installations of renewable energy sources pose new challenges for conventional combustion technologies. To analyze potential adaption processes due to this...

The convergence debate of whether poorer countries are catching up with richer ones has recently focused on the concept of club convergence, hence convergence within groups of countries. Formally detecting club convergence in the distribution of countries' income per capita over time has,...

The existence and persistence of large spatial disparities in un-employment within national economies is a central issue in regional economics. Previous empirical analyses have largely disregarded the role of fundamentals. On the contrary in this paper we explore the link between labour...