New evidence confirms the conclusion of former surveys that the link between school resources and student performance is generally missing in educational production. While the conventional within-country cross-section evidence remains controversial, recent contributions which control for...

Die vorliegende Untersuchung stellt die Probleme des internationalen Dienstleistungshandels dar; sie analysiert und bewertet die derzeit gültigen Regelungen des GATS. Sowohl die konzeptionelle Problematik der Definition von Dienstleistungen und Dienstleistungshandel, als auch die sich aus der...

This paper analyses the link between venture capitalists’ sources of funds, such as banks and pension funds, and the specialization pattern of venture capital investments in particular industries and particular stages of enterprises’ development. Based on a panel data set of Western European...

Based on Baumol's cost-disease model, we develop two alternative measures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Both productivity measures are based on changes in the relative price of schooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schooling has increased faster in 1970-94...

The standard derivation of a Phillips curve from a DSGE model requires that all variables are measured as deviations from their steady states. But in practice this is not done. The steady state for output is estimated by some statistical procedure, such as the HP filter, and the steady state for...

Previous studies have mainly used reports in the financial press to analyze the link between the interventions of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) and exchange rate volatility. We use official intervention data for the period 1993-2000 that were released only recently by the BoJ and find that the...

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transi¬tion to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical strategy is...

Nationally implemented protected area measures for biodiversity conservation generate cross-border externalities. For internalizing these externalities at the international level, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has been established as a multilateral mechanism of transfer. This paper...

This paper surveys the decision-theoretic foundations of health care production and derives policy implications. The priority at the beginning of the 21st century must be to accelerate the diffusion of new medical knowledge, a public good, so that the efficiency in the adoption of new technology...

Catching-up of East German productivity to West German levels has completely faded out since the mid l990s. The remaining productivity gap cannot be attributed to an inferior capital endowment. Instead, it appears to be the result of an inappropriate design of industrial policy which fostered...