Following a major earthquake off the Pacific coast of Japan, a tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three reactors in Fukushima, causing a major nuclear accident on 11 March 2011. Based on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach we use panel data for 5,979 individuals...

Russia and China are assumed to challenge democratization and to promote autocracy. In a first step, we analyze Central Asia as the most-likely case, considering both Russia and China as relevant external actors. We develop a concept for our analysis based on the different strategies of Russia...

We analyze whether foreign direct investment (FDI) has contributed to the typically wide income gaps in five Latin American host countries. We perform country-specific and panel cointegration techniques to assess the long-run impact of inward FDI stocks on income inequality among households in...

Does regional unemployment increase or rather decrease entrepreneurial activity? Although this question has been hotly debated among researchers for decades the answers yielded so far are ambiguous and inconclusive. The paper proposes an innovative approach that takes not only interregional...

This paper analyzes the state and impact of financial literacy in a so far largely neglected group: the middle class in emerging economies. This group is of increasing importance for implementing structural change, including the proper use of sophisticated financial products. We survey middle...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

Deflation is said to dampen aggregate demand because consumers would defer purchases while waiting for prices to fall further in the future. We explore the validity of this reasoning at the level of individual goods. Our findings suggest that the widespread concerns about impaired aggregate...

The possibility to outsource over the internet should revolutionize foreign outsourcing, especially for services (UNCTAD, 2004). Our model describes materials and services input allocation from domestic vs. foreign suppliers. Allocations change when firms outsource online due to access and...

Estonia is widely regarded as a paramount example for a successful transformation of a socialist economic system to a functioning market economy. Against the backdrop of this positive image which contrasts strongly with the crisis scenarios in Southern Europe the remaining problems of Estonia...

We investigate the effects of a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) in an order-driven artificial financial market. FTTs are meant to limit short-term speculative behavior by reducing the amount of excess liquidity in the system. To quantify these effects, adjustments in trading strategies and their...