In diesem kurzen Aufsatz werden die Kosten des Terrors für den internationalen Handel diskutiert. Unstrittig ist, dass Unsicherheit und Gewalt die wirtschaftliche Aktivität lähmen können. Ob auch terroristische Aktionen, die häufig isolierte Ereignisse darstellen, selten auf direkte...

Politicians travel extensively abroad, for various reasons. One purpose of external visits is to improve bilateral economic relations. In this paper, I examine the effect of state visits on international trade. I use a large data set covering the travel activities of the heads of state of...

In this paper, I provide a quantitative review of the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities; the meta-analysis combines 515 estimates from 29 studies. I find that the combined estimate of the Zipf coefficient is significantly larger than 1.0. This finding implies that cities are on...

A potential vehicle to move capital unrecorded out of a country is the misinvoicing of international trade transactions. Exporters may understate the export revenue on their invoices and importers may overstate import expenditures, while their trading partners are instructed to deposit the...

Recent estimates suggest that developing countries lose about 1 trillion US dollars each year due to illicit financial flows. This paper reviews the empirical methodology that underlies those estimates. Various critical aspects of the analytical approach are highlighted, focusing in particular...