We use the largest common factor in 14 items reported in the World Values Surveys as a robust measure of religiosity. This measure is held to identify the importance of religion in all aspects of people's life. The level of religiosity differs by about 50 percentage points between rich and poor...

The agricultural transition, the demographic transition and the democratic transition explain the development paths of the share of agriculture, the population growth rate, and the standard democracy indices. We demonstrate that two related estimation models give contradictory results when...

We show that the specification of technology differences in recent empirical studies of trade is not supported by basic growth theory and may lead to biased estimates of the pattern of specialization and trade.

Die entwicklungspolitische Debatte hat lange darunter gelitten, daß ihr eine überzeugende theoretische Grundlage fehlte. Dies beginnt sich seit einigen Jahren mit dem Aufkommen der "neuen" Wachstumstheorie zu ändern. Deren Implikationen stützen das, was neoklassisch orientierte...

Most empirical studies of long run growth refer to one of the two seminal contributions by Robert Solow (1956, 1957). His work shows that in order to estimate the relative roles of factor accumulation and technology in development, an a priori identification assumption is needed about the nature...

Die Herausforderung: Steigender Anpassungsdruck durch die Globalisierung der Märkte Die Globalisierung der Märkte wird in Europa vor allem deswegen als schmerzhaft empfunden, weil sie mehr Flexibilität auf den besonders geschützten Arbeitsmärkten erfordert. Unter Druck geraten vor allem...

The international empirical evidence on the economics of education reveals one central insight and two puzzles, which are all relevant for the case of the Baltic States. The central insight is that social rates of return to education tend to be higher than the social opportunity costs of...

The strikingly different labor market performance of major industrial countries suggests that neither globalization nor skill-biased technological change necessarily result in rising unemployment or declining wages of low-skilled workers. Rather, globalization and technological change cause...