Even as the United States enjoys an economic expansion, there is an undercurrent of concern among economic analysts who follow financial markets. Some feel that the expansion of the credit derivatives markets poses the threat of a crisis similar to the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of...

In this paper, we provide evidence that expanding firms tend to serve new markets which are geographically close and culturally related to their prior export destinations. We quantify the impact of this spatial pattern using a Chinese firm-level data set. To ensure an exogenous set of potential...

Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...

The quintessence of recent natural science studies is that the 2°C target can only be achieved with massive emission reductions in the next few years. The central twist of this paper is the addition of this limited time to act into a non-perpetual real options framework analysing optimal...

This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as...

Greece has reached a point where, under any plausible macroeconomic scenario, public debt will continue growing faster than GDP. Fiscal consolidation alone cannot close the solvency gap. A substantial reduction in the stock of debt is needed. Even post-debt restructuring, there is no guarantee...

This paper reviews evidence from 44 middle income countries on how the recent financial crisis affected jobs and workers' income. In addition to providing a rare assessment of the magnitude of the impact across several middle-income countries, the paper describes how labor markets adjusted and...

The role of money in producing sustained subjective well-being seems to be seriously compromised by social comparisons and habituation. But does that necessarily mean that we would be better off doing something else instead? This paper suggests that the phenomena of comparison and habituation...