Innovations, be they radical new products or technology improvements are widely recognized as a key factor of economic growth. To identify the factors triggering innovative activities is a main concern for economic theory and empirical analysis. As the number of hypotheses is large, the process...

With official development assistance (ODA) set to rise as countries strive to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), aid effectiveness remains an important area of development policy. An increasing number of studies support the notion that ODA can contribute to growth in a nonlinear...

An increase in the level of interest rates is said to have a negative impact on banks net interest margins in the short run. Using a time series of more than 40 years for the German banking system, we show that the opposite effect exists in the long run, where an increase in the level of...

It is widely perceived that the supply of mortgages, especially since the extensive liberalization of the mortgage market since the 1980s, has had implications for the Dutch housing market. In this paper we introduce a new method to estimate a credit condition index (CCI). The credit conditions...

This paper analyzes the relationship between debt and the production decision of companies active in the exploration and production of oil and gas in the United States. Over the last couple of years, the development and application of innovative extraction methods, like hydraulic fracturing and...

Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)? Recent empirical evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is that it considers only average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or by population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have...

This paper hypothesizes and empirically establishes the persistent effects of novelty-seeking traits on cross-country differences in scientific knowledge creation. I use data on the prevalence of specific allele variants of the human DRD4 exon III gene, which population geneticists have linked...