Recent research indicates that the democratic peace - the observation that democratic nations rarely fight each other - is spurious: that advanced capitalism accounts for both democracy and the democratic peace (Mousseau 2009). This is not a trivial prospect: if economic conditions explain the...

We test the hypothesis that net foreign asset positions are consistent with external solvency and examine the dynamics of external adjustment using data for 50 countries over the 1970-2006 period. Our analysis adapts Bohn's (2007) error-correction reaction function approach - which tests for a...

This study examines the impact of creditor rights on cash holdings using a sample of firms from 48 countries. We argue that creditor rights affect the willingness of lenders to provide credit, which in turn affects the need for internal liquidity and cash holdings. Consistent with this, we find...

The global financial crisis of 2007-09 has led to an intensive research program analyzing a wide range of issues related to financial crises. This paper presents a summary of a forthcoming book, Financial Crises: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses, that includes 19 contributions...

Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles played by the...

In Auseinandersetzung mit natürlichen, geographischen und klimatischen Bedingungen haben sich im Verlauf langer historischer Prozesse typische und arbeitsteilig aufeinander bezogene Funktionen von maritimen Wirtschaftsstrukturen, Küstenregionen und Hafenstädten herausgebildet. Ein zentrales...

In this paper we first consider alternative measures of efficiency. We explain why simple partial productivity measures are inadequate as the basis of overall measures of efficiency, and outline two alternative approaches. The first is technical efficiency - the degree to which output is...

Assessing railway efficiency is complex for a number of reasons. Railways produce a wide range of outputs including passenger service, freight service and, in some cases, separated infrastructure access services. Railways that differ in scale or in the mix of these services inherently differ in...