This paper investigates the relationship between external indebtedness and economic growth, with a particular attention to LICs, for which the theoretical arguments of debt overhang and liquidity constraint have to be reconsidered. The estimation of a growth model, with a panel of 121 developing...

Policymakers in developing countries have increasingly pinned their hopes on bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in order to improve their chances in the worldwide competition for foreign direct investment (FDI). However, the effectiveness of BITs in inducing higher FDI inflows is still open to...

This paper analyses the impact of aid flows on governance. Using an instrumental variable approach and a large country sample, we find that aid has a negative rather than a positive influence on governance. This outcome is robust to various model specifications.

The time-continuous discrete-state Markov process is a model for rating transitions. One parameter, namely the intensity to migrate to an adjacent rating state, implies an ordinal rating to have an intuitive metric. State-specific intensities generalize the state-stationarity. Observing Markov...

Abstract We investigate how the development of the financial industry connects with renewable energy. We analyze 198 countries over three decades in various model settings (fixed effects, random effects, dynamic panel). We use a wide range of proxies for the development of the financial industry...

We analyze the relationship between institutional quality and firm efficiency. Using rich data on firms in the European Union between 2005 and 2012, we show that high institutional quality lowers the share of persistently inefficiently used assets. The adverse effect of low institutional quality...

Firms competitive strategy in industrialised countries is increasingly based on activities such as the inventions of new processes and products, the improvements of the employees skill, the creation of a reputation for company's products. All these actions are intended to increase firms economic...

This paper investigates whether localization economies as brought forward by Marshall (1890) or urbanization economies as mentioned by Jacobs (1970) are more decisive for regional gross value added per capita. Our novel approach is to explicitly allow for interdependencies between these two...

A recent strand of the economic literature has emphasised the role of services, and in particular knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), as a primary source of knowledge creation and diffusion. Since this transferring process often occurs through strong face-to-face interactions, the role...