Global agreements to mitigate climate change, conserve biodiversity or combat desertification typically take center stage in scholarly discussions about international environmental politics. Even though the United Nations Environment Programme reported ten years ago that regional agreements make...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate empirically the determinants of innovative activities in emerging countries, with particular attention to national, international and intersectoral knowledge spillovers. Our study concerns 16 emerging and 10 technology source countries, for the period...

This paper argues that planned health care provision and market regulation play distinct roles in relation to the effective provision of equitable health care. Governmental planned provision has as a core objective ensuring that the health system is redistributive and that the poor have access...

Modern macroeconomic models have been widely criticised as relying too much on rationality and market efficiency. However, basically their predictions about this crisis are being borne out by events. Crashes are an integral part of an efficient market capitalism and are brought on by swings in...

We present a simple model explaining corruption on geography and climate conditions. We test the model's validity in a cross-section of 115 countries. Controlling for all other corruption's determinants we find evidence supporting the model's predictions. Corruption increases with temperature...

We analyze the cross-national distribution of GDP per capita and its evolution from 1970 to 2003. We argue that peaks are not a suitable measure for distinct growth regimes, because the number of peaks is not invariant under strictly monotonic transformations of the data (e.g. original vs. log...

We examine the long-run relationship between fertility, mortality, and income using panel cointegration techniques and the available data for the last century. Our main result is that mortality changes and growth of income per capita account for a major part of the fertility change...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...