It is a widely held belief that foreign direct investment (FDI) has a positive effect on economic growth. We test this hypothesis by performing convergence regressions derived from a model of endogenous technological change. We estimate the rate of growth in per-capita income, relative to the...

Measures of corruption and income are highly correlated across countries. We use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels. We find that our instrumented incomes explain the cross-country pattern of corruption just as well as do actual incomes. This result...

Within the last decades, the share of government aid in overall external financial flows to developing countries has decreased. It is estimated that between 75 and 85% of all current financial flows to developing countries derive from a variety of private sources, including remittances,...

Do network theory really offer a suitable concept for the theorization of informal processes of economic regulation and institutional change? This working paper challenges both essentialist and skeptical attitudes to networks through an examination of the positive and negative effects of network...

Bono's Product (RED) initiative was created to raise awareness and money for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by teaming up with major corporations to market RED co-branded products. RED has been built upon the principle that 'hard commerce' can be an appropriate vector...

One of the most significant casualties of the recent fi nancial crisis has been the Basel II Accord, a set of proposals to regulate the international banking system drawn up by a committee of G10 banking supervisors between 1999 and 2004. Whether or not they view Basel II as a direct contributor...

The present discussions about the future of bank regulation, coming after a long period of bank deregulation, have a natural tendency to exaggerate the effectiveness of regulation. But those discussions are poorly rooted in the macroeconomic foundations of bank intermediation, including its...

Despite the global financial crisis and the prospect of severe economic recession, debates on future financial regulation take little if any notice of reasons why the previous regime of financial regulation failed so spectacularly. The paper identifies the key presumptions underlying efforts to...