Initially this paper outlines the concept of a tax on all transactions to do with financial assets. It summarises the main arguments for and against such a tax. The next part documents the relevant empirical evidence necessary to be able to evaluate the arguments. In particular the development...

With its 21 variables, the new composite globalisation index presented in this paper accounts for the multidimensionality of this phenomenon instead of relying purely on economic indicators. As compared to other existing globalisation indices, three major innovations are introduced: First, five...

The deepening of the recent crisis was driven by the simultaneous devaluation of stock wealth, housing wealth and commodity wealth. The potential for this devaluation process had been "built up" during the boom of stock prices, house prices and commodity prices between 2003 and 2007. Hence, this...

This paper compares the depth and length of the recent crisis with the Great Depression in the 1930s. It claims that economic policy played a crucial role in shortening and curtailing the recent crisis. We analyse which policies were applied during the recent crisis and which measures worked. We...

The determinants of venture capital investment have attracted a significant amount of attention from both academics and policymakers. We use a version of the Keuschnigg-Nielsen model for venture-capital financed projects to condition our analysis on a reasonable set of exogenous variables but we...

The growth performance of countries proved to be very different during the recent crisis. We apply principal component analysis to derive a single ordinal indicator on growth performance and to analyse whether initial conditions of economies or structural characteristics can explain the...

This paper investigates the performance of labour markets during the recent crisis for 28 industrialised countries, specifically the reaction of employment and unemployment indicators relative to output changes. We construct a composite indicator for output as well as labour market performance....

This paper investigates the determinants of the growth elasticity of poverty by using the internationally designed poverty line, measured by the share of the population living below USD 1.25 per day. We identify the determinants of changes in the poverty rate of countries using single and...

In this paper we present a new long-term database on monthly export and import series for 23 economies during 1921-2010 and its first empirical application. Using these data, we analyse the synchronised decline in foreign trade during the recession 2008-09 in a historical perspective. We...