Ethnic and religious fractionalization have important effects on economic growth and development, but their role in internal violent conflicts has been found to be negligible and statistically insignificant. These findings have been invoked in refutation of the Huntington hypothesis, according...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while...

The typical identification strategy in aid effectiveness studies assumes donor motives do not influence the impact of aid on growth. We call this homogeneity assumption into question, first constructing a model in which donor motives matter and then testing the assumption empirically.

This paper examines the effect of global transition to simpler, flatter income tax systems on the size of the shadow economy. By offering a new estimation framework, the paper revives the traditional electricity consumption approach to measuring the shadow economy. It overcomes the limitations...

There is no significant relationship between the improvement in happiness and the long term rate of growth of GDP per capita. This is true for three groups of countries analyzed separately - 17 developed, 9 developing, and 11 transition - and also for the 37 countries taken together. Time series...

International migration of people is a momentous and complex phenomenon. Research on its causes and consequences, requires sufficient data. While some datasets are available, the nature of migration complicates their scientific use. Virtually no existing dataset captures international migration...

Higher education, like any other commodity or service, has been viewed in a variety of economic frameworks. Little of this work, however, appears to have made any effort to define carefully the boundaries of the relevant market for higher education, which is the subject of this particular...

In this paper we explore the relationship between the individual decision to become an entrepreneur and the institutional context. We pinpoint the critical roles of property rights and the size of the state sector for entrepreneurial activity and test the relationships empirically by combining...

It has been known for centuries that the rich and famous have longer lives than the poor and ordinary. Causality, however, remains trenchantly debated. The ideal experiment would be one in which status and money could somehow be dropped upon a sub-sample of individuals while those in a control...

Recent changes in information and communication technologies (ICT) have contributed to a dramatic increase in the integration and interdependence of countries, markets and people. This paper focuses on an increasingly important aspect of globalization, the international movement of people, with...