In an attempt to disentangle the impact of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures on trade patterns, we estimate a Heckman selection model on the HS4 disaggregated level of trade. We find that aggregated SPS measures constitute barriers to agricultural and food trade consistently to all...

As a new approach we study individual wage compensations due to income risksmeasured by the variance and skewness of the wage distributions in different occupational groups. Using German administrative panel data and estimating a fixed effects model we confirm the expected positive effect of the...

In this paper we specify and estimate different Markov-switching (MS) regime autoregressive models. The empirical performance of the univariate MS models used to describe the switches between different economic regimes for the G-7 countries is in general not satisfactory. We extend these models...

Both theoretical and empirical studies have shown that democracy and corruption have substantial influence on environmental policy. In this paper, we empirically analyse whether both democracy and corruption are equally important determinants. When these variables are jointly included as...

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individual attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, this paper assesses such positional impact on social capital by applying 14 different measurements to International Social Survey Programme data from 25 countries. We...

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to...

Using data from US states, we find a positive relationship between trust and growth. According to our results, a 10 percentage point increase in trust increases the growth rate of per capita income by 0.5 percentage point, growth rate of housing prices by 1.25 percentage points, and the growth...

This study uses the hedonic approach to measure the amenity value of climate in Germany. Unlike in earlier research separate hedonic wage and house price regressions are estimated for relatively small geographic areas and formal tests undertaken to determine whether the coefficients describing...

Following along the lines of a growing literature on the causal link between export- ing and productivity this paper analyzes the existence of flearning-by-exporting using firm-level data. The paper asks whether, in addition to better perfirming firms self-selecting into exports and...

This paper analyzes the importance of taxes on corporate income and production-related tangible infrastructure as detfirminants of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Central- and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). We operationalize taxes using effective average tax rates on the bilateral level...