Previous work has established that an appreciation of the real exchange rate (REER) con-tributes to premature deindustrialization, less productive investment and dependence on commodity booms and busts in emerging markets economies (EME). From the literature, it is less clear, however, what the...

There exists an intense debate about the effects of corporate tax cuts on the formation of private capital in the real sector. This paper studies the investment impact of the effective fiscal burden of firms during the period 1995-2014. To this end, in a first step national accounts data is used...

Income inequality and house prices have risen sharply in developed countries during the last three decades. We argue that this co-movement is no coincidence but that inequality has driven up house prices on the grounds that it raises the total demand for houses, which inflates their prices...

Natural resource-seeking foreign direct investment (FDI) rose substantially during the last two decades as global commodity prices soared. This type of FDI typically is expected to improve the current accounts of recipient countries. Notwithstanding the commodity boom, however, current account...

This paper is the first to decompose absolute global income inequality into its within-country class and between country-location components. The estimates show that until 1970 locational income differences were the main driver of absolute global inequality, whereas its recent growth can be...

Rising income inequality has recently moved into the centre of political and economic debates in line with increasing claims that a global rise in income inequality might have been a root cause of the subprime crisis. This paper provides an extensive overview of world scale developments in...

An increasing number of economists argue that income inequality was a root cause behind the subprime crisis of 2007. The aim of this paper is to outline and contrast the theoretical underpinnings of Marxian, Post Keynesian and mainstream crisis theories and to compare their viewpoints regarding...

Several Nobel laureates economists have called for redistributive policies. This paper shows that there is a strong case for redistributive policies because the global increase of income inequality and wealth concentration was an important driver for the financial and Eurozone crisis. The high...