The long-lasting nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has caused a severe slowdown of economic activity within and between the two economies involved. Palestine is currently afflicted with economic stagnation and structural bottlenecks - namely sharp income reductions, low investors'...

We present a detailed analysis of energy intensity developments across 23 service sectors in 18 OECD countries over the period 1980-2005. We find that the shift towards a service economy has contributed to lower overall energy intensity levels in the OECD, but this contribution would have been...

This paper uses a new dataset derived from a consistent framework of national accounts to compute and evaluate energy intensity developments across 18 OECD countries and 50 sectors over the period 1970-2005. We find that across countries energy intensity levels tend to increase in a fairly wide...

This paper makes use of a new dataset to investigate energy intensity developments in the Netherlands over the period 1987-2005. The dataset allows for a comparison with 18 other OECD countries. A key feature of our analysis is that we combine a cross-country perspective with a high level of...

This paper analyzes the influence of the shadow economy on corruption and vice versa. We hypothesize that corruption and shadow economy are substitutes in high income countries while they are complements in low income countries. The hypotheses are tested for a crosssection of 120 countries and a...

Long term trends in happiness and income are not related; short term fluctuations in happiness and income are positively associated. Evidence for this is found in time series data for developed countries, transition countries, and less developed countries, whether analyzed separately or pooled....

Der Aufsatz gibt einige wissenschaftliche Stellungnahmen zu dem Buch "Deutschland schafft sich ab" wieder und befasst sich mit den möglichen Folgewirkungen auf die Finanzierung der gesetzlichen Rentenversichung sowie den Bundeshaushalt.

In the early days of transition Poland hosted regional earning disparities. Low levels of worker and firm mobility allow us to threat regions as local labor markets. Wage behavior is modeled in regional labor markets as an outcome of the speed of transition examining employment restructuring in...

This paper aims to test the conjecture advanced in a recent work by Bianchi and Menegatti (2007) that usual !convergence panel regressions may produce biased evidence, due to their inability to distinguish between actual catching-up across countries and decreasing growth rates over time within...

Malawi confronts a development imperative in a context of rising temperatures and deep uncertainty about precipitation trends. We evaluate the implications of climate change for overall growth and development prospects to 2050. We focus on three impact channels: agriculture, road infrastructure,...