This paper focuses on the impact of maritime piracy on international trade. Piracy increases the cost of international maritime transport through an increase in insecurity regarding goods deliveries. Bilateral trade flows between the main European and Asian countries over the 1999 to 2008 period...

This paper assesses the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on CO2 emissions. With this aim a dynamic panel data model is estimated for a cross-section of 213 countries over the period 1960 to 2009. The model, based on a STIRPAT approach, also integrates the EKC approach and specifically considers the...

This study aims to identify robust push and pull factors of human trafficking. I test for the robustness of 78 push and 67 pull factors suggested in the literature. By employing an extreme bound analysis, running more than two million regressions with all possible combinations of variables for...

The typical identification strategy in aid effectiveness studies assumes donor motives do not influence the impact of aid on growth. We call this homogeneity assumption into question, first constructing a model in which donor motives matter and then testing the assumption empirically.

The focus of this paper is to estimate the effect of the different types of regional trade agreements on the volume of trade between country pairs. The analysis will employ the 'empirical workhorse' of international trade; the gravity model. We hypothesize that the deeper agreements have a stronger...

Ethnic fragmentation is a variable increasingly used in the economic literature to explain differences in economic development level, growth or the incidence of conflicts. Nearly all articles have in common that they treat ethnic fragmentation as a static, exogenous fact. Only recently some...

The paper discusses the reform of capital regulation of banks in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2009. Whereas the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision seems to go for marginal changes here and there, the paper calls for a thorough overhaul, moving away from risk calibration and...

In an influential paper, La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer (2002) argued that public ownership of banks is associated with lower GDP growth. We show that this relationship does not hold for all countries, but depends on a country's financial development and political institutions. Public...

There is a considerable debate in the legal literature about the purpose of antitrust institutions. Some argue that antitrust law merely serves the purpose of economic growth, while others have a broader perspective on the function of antitrust, maintaining that the prevention of economic...

Did breakthroughs in core processes during the Industrial Revolution tend to generate further innovations in downstream technologies? Here a theoretical model examines the effect of a political shock on a non-innovating society in which there is high potential willingness to cooperate. The...