Rational choice approaches to customary international law have gained in prominence in recent years. Although becoming increasingly sophisticated, they are not able to explain all phenomena of customary international law. This contribution claims that there are two different types of unwritten...

Theoretical and empirical studies of different sciences suggest that an optimal committee consists of roughly 5-9 members, although it can swell mildly under specific circumstances. This paper develops a conceptual model in order to analyze the issue in case of monetary policy formulation. The...

The present paper extends the Obstfeld and Rogoff (2005) framework of current account imbalances by the oil exporting countries as a fourth region. It sets the stage for a variety of analysis that can be conducted within a four-region-setting that accounts for the importance of OPEC as a major...

this paper analyzes two effects which might have an important impact on a reduction of global external imbalances. These are valuation effects on the one hand and interest rate effects on the other hand. We use a four-region model that is based on the models by Obstfeld and Rogoff (2005) and...

In this paper we explore empirically a long-standing question in the literature on finance for growth, namely whether the financial structure -in terms of the size of the banking system relative to the capital market- matters for economic growth. We build upon the existing literature by...

While the economic theory predicts that developing countries will gain the most from technology spillovers, there have been only a few analyses looking at this question empirically. The present study focuses on a panel of 27 transition and 20 Western European countries between 1990 and 2006 and...

Successful economic development is usually characterized by two salient phenomena: industrialization and demographic transition. Chronologically both events happen so closely to each other that historians and economists alike suspect that they are interrelated. This paper develops a theory for...

The role patents play for innovation is not clear, but patenting activity has increased in the last decades. This article reviews the empirical evidence on traditional and novel roles of patents to assess their impacts on innovation in developing countries. It shows that patents are not likely...

The telecommunications in the 1990s witnessed an enormous worldwide round of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). This paper examines the innovation determinants of M&A activity and the consequences of M&A transactions on the technological potential and the innovation performance. We examine the...