What leads the United Nations Security Council to intervene in one conflict, but remain inactive in others of similar magnitude and cruelty? This paper analyzes all registered 178 internal and internationalized internal conflicts since 1945, with the goal to unveil what determines the...

Countries with diversi ed export baskets take advantage of various bene ts, which are said to foster and stabilize economic growth directly and through indirect channels (e.g. reduced income volatility, positive externalities, spillover e ects). This is especially important in the context of...

Is corruption capable of spreading across national borders? This paper uses panel data for 120 countries from 1995 to 2012 to evaluate whether the corruption levels ofneighboring countries, as weighted by the relative joint border length, affects domestic corruption. Including country fixed...

This paper proposes urbanization as a determinant of government size. As people move to cities, their demand for a more de ned set of regulations, but also for basic health, education, and income standards rises. Our theoretical framework determines how the regional distribution of the...

This paper reconsiders the effects of volatile growth rates on growth itself. I show that the underlying endogeneity of government size can hide the net growth effects from volatility. There exists a positive direct and a negative indirect channel, with the latter operating through the size of...

This paper argues that considerable switches in monetary policy are able to explain a major part of the forward discount puzzle. We build a theoretical model suggesting that violations of the uncovered interest rate parity are owed to shifts in monetary policy from a destabilizing (when the...