Most FDI takes place between the developed countries, which suggests that the market-seeking motive is important for understanding FDI. However, given the stylized fact that trade barriers (e.g. transportation costs and financial barriers) have declined over the past 20 years, models that aim to...

The majority of theoretical and empirical studies on the relationship between decentralization and corruption argues that the devolution of power might be a feasible instrument to keep corruption at bay. We argue that this result crucially depends on the effectiveness of monitoring bureaucrat's...

High oil prices are normally expected to stimulate exploration and the development of new oil and gas fields. But over the last few years, financial analysts have focused strongly on shortterm accounting return (RoACE) for benchmarking and valuation, and this has led to high capital discipline...

This paper performs a meta-analysis of empirical estimates of uncompensated labour supply elasticities. We find that much of the variation in elasticities can be explained by the variation in gender, participation rates, and country fixed effects. Country differences appear to be small though....

Central bank governor changes in emerging markets may convey important signals about future monetary policy. Based on a new daily data set, this paper examines the reactions of foreign exchange markets, domestic stock market indices and sovereign bond spreads to central bank governor changes....

In this paper we examine the importance of financial and other obstacles to innovation in the Netherlands using statistical information from the CIS 3.5 innovation survey. We report results on the effect of these obstacles on the firms' decision to abandon, prematurely stop, seriously slow down,...

Since 2004, China has been backed into a situation where the renminbi is expected to go ever higher against the dollar, and this one-way bet has led to a loss of domestic monetary control. Combined with a more general flight from the U.S. dollar, the resulting monetary explosion in China...

Using micro data on more than 130,000 individuals from 69 countries, we analyze the extent to which joblessness of the individuals and the prevailing unemployment rate in the country impact perceptions of the effectiveness of democracy. We find that personal joblessness experience translates...