This paper brings a long-term perspective to the debate on the causes of worktime differences among OECD countries. Exploiting new data sets on hours of work per week, days at work per year, and annual work hours between 1870 and 2000, we challenge the conventional view that Europeans began to...

This paper utilizes a unique dataset on votes cast by Czech and Polish migrants in their recent national elections to investigate the impact of institutional, political and economic characteristics on migrants’ voting behavior. The political preferences of migrants are strikingly different...

With the rise of international bond markets in the 1990s, the role of sovereign credit ratings has become increasingly important. In the aftermath of Asian Crises a series of empirical studies on the effects of sovereign ratings appeared. The theoretical literature on the topic, however, remains...

The objective of this paper is to situate the MENA area within the emerging markets universe. We first discuss the various components of market emergence and generate four bootstrapped indexes reflecting market size, market activity, market pricing and transparency. We then draw inter-regional...

We estimate productivity dynamics within 4-digit manufacturing industries, using FAME data on UK Companies, from 1994 to 2003. We extend the algorithm in Olley and Pakes (1996) to allow for a selection bias driven by the Melitz (2003) effect (high productivity types selecting to exporting) to...

Uneven development and globalization are associated with problems of poverty, resource scarcity, competition and conflict. The solution to these problems often presented by donors is better national, and also global governance: the creation of a governance matrix, prescribing and proscribing...

What determines the composition of external liabilities, both across countries and over time? More specifically, which countries account for the massive increase in equity-like liabilities (foreign direct investment and portfolio equity), especially since the mid-1990s? The empirical analysis...

The EU Common Market Organisation has remained largely unchanged since its inception nearly 40 years ago. Reform has become inevitable due to changes to other sectors in the Common Agriculture Policy and pressure arising from international commitments. The current system provides sufficient...

A driving factor in any open-economy macroeconomics model is the degree of international financial integration. This suggests that understanding the sources of the recent explosive growth in cross-border asset trade and the impact of the upscaling in gross and net international investment...

We use a panel of more than 100 countries for the period 1980 to 2002 to analyse the relationship between inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and wage inequality. We particularly check whether this relationship is non-linear, in line with a theoretical discussion. We find that the effect of...