The aim of this paper is to discuss excess comovements for the Euro/US dollar and British pound/US dollar exchange rates, i.e. we look for comovements of exchange rates which are stronger than implied by fundamentals. The results of the empirical analysis give evidence that excess comovements...

During the last decades, current account imbalances increased all over the world. In this context, countries with current account surpluses, in the European Union especially Germany, are increasingly blamed for their modest wage policies, which are seen as the main reason for global imbalances....

The German educational system finds itself being criticized by the OECD in its Programme for International Student Assessment. Family background would heavily influence children’s academic achievements. A child stemming from a high class family has a 3.1 times higher chance to go to...

Services sectors\' agglomeration in the European Union, its development over time, its driving factors and dynamic tendencies will be empirically investigated in this study. Locational gini coefficients are computed taking EU-KLEMS data for 14 European countries covering 22 services sectors over...

We assess the determinants of the wide variation in the efficiency of foreign aid activities across US-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In particular, we analyze whether non-charitable expenditures for administration, management and fundraising depend on the intensity of competition...

Major DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. On the other hand, new donors (many of which were aid...

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...