As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the ease with which individuals\' tasks can be offshored. Our analysis relates to recent theoretical contributions arguing that there is only a loose relationship between the suitability of a task for offshoring and the...

The nature of international trade has changed significantly. For centuries, trade concentrated on the exchange of finished goods. It now increasingly involves bits of value that are added at different locations to combine into one final product. Therefore, trade in functions or tasks are of...

Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

The paper presents a new sectoral taxonomy that focuses on the existence of non negligible external effects, deriving from user-producer knowledge interactions, the latter in turn coupled with intermediate goods transactions, in a system of vertically integrated manufacturing and services...

The aim of the paper is to discuss and to provide evidence for the existence of pecuniary knowledge externalities, considered here as the main cause of positive disequilibrium experience by downstream producers. This last effect, confirmed by the empirical analysis here performed, contrasts the...

We investigate whether elected members of the United Nations Security Council receive favorable treatment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), analyzing panel data on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the period of 1992 to...

Germany could have reached obligations set by the Kyoto protocol earlier if German solar investments had been relocated to Sicily. Under the protocol, additional benefits of emission savings and energy production should rise to 72%. However in 2008, German solar power plants only accounted for...

This paper investigates empirically the occurrence of pecuniary knowledge externalities at the sectoral level across European economies. The main results suggest that, although some sectors can be considered as playing a particularly important role as a source of pecuniary knowledge...

Severance pay is a vital part of employment protection legislation (EPL). We investigate the incidence and level of severance pay for dismissed employees. Our theoretical model predicts that not only the law and its interpretation by labour courts but also the costs of a suit have an impact....