We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual's decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from corruption, and on 'market freedom' defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property...

The payoff to schooling among the foreign born in the US is only around one-half of the payoff for the native born. This paper examines whether this differential is related to the quality of the schooling immigrants acquired abroad. The paper uses the Over-education/ Required...

As multiple countries share a river, the likelihood of a water resource conflict from climate change could be higher between countries. In this paper, we demonstrate how countries can cooperate in transboundary water sharing in a sustainable way, given the impacts of climate change. We...

An economic theory of immigration and immigrant absorption for a religious minority is developed and applied to Jewish history. Human capital is classified according to whether it is allocative or productive, transferable or location-specific, general or Jewish. Crossclassifying these categories...

Evidence from a sample of countries show that people roughly spend as much time watching television as earning their living. Moreover, television viewing and work hours are positively correlated across countries. A simple model based on complementarities in the organization of free time is...

We formulate a simple theoretical model of a banking industry that we use to identify and construct theory-based measures of systemic bank shocks (SBS). These measures differ from 'banking crisis' (BC) indicators employed in many empirical studies, which are constructed using primarily...

We use comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. Our overall results are in line with the big picture that is by now familiar from the literature: Exporters are more...