Does economic freedom increase the utility of an average citizen? Public choice theory in particular has emphasized the shortcomings of governments and voting processes, and the advantages of relying on markets and individual decision making. However, an increasing amount of people are refusing...

Ziel dieses Projekts ist die Analyse eines möglichen Zusammenhangs des jüngsten Ölpreisanstiegs mit dem Peak-Oil Effekt, welcher sich über die Verknappung des Erdölangebots realisieren würde. Ein direkter Test einer solchen Interrelation ist jedoch erst ex-post möglich. Dieses Paper...

The empirical literature on nominal exchange rates shows that the current exchange rate is often a better predictor of future exchange rates than a linear combination of macroeconomic fundamentals. This result is behind the famous Meese-Rogoff puzzle. In this paper we evaluate whether parameter...

While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I develop an empirical strategy that...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

We examine episodes of large gross FDI inflows - surges - at the sectoral level between 1994 and 2009 for 95 emerging-market and industrial countries. We find that surges in the primary and manufacturing sectors are less cyclical and associated with lower macroeconomic volatility than surges in...

The econometric study of civil war is increasing recognized to suffer from problems of 'over-aggregation'. As such, there is a high risk of estimation biases, ecological fallacies, and endogeneity problems. In this paper, I seek to contribute to the disaggregation of the study of civil war by...

The paper presents new results on within-country regional inequality in per capita income for 36 countries during 1995-2005; focusing on Europe but with some non-European countries included for comparison. In 23 of the 36 countries there was a significant increase in regional inequality during the...