External refereed essays

Security as a Public, Private or Club Good: Some Fundamental Considerations

Security is often defined as the absence of threats. However, security has far more aspects, reaching from security of nation states to health security. Baldwin (1997) formulated seven questions to narrow the (broad) concept of security. Along with Baldwin's questions, this paper analyses 'security' in the context of private, public, and club goods and their changing mixture. On the individual level, ...

The Economics of Terrorism from a Policy-Maker's Perspective

This paper introduces a brief framework on the political decision-making process in the context of terrorism. I relate the trade-offs policy-makers are faced with to the economic terrorism literature. Past years have shown a steady increase in theoretical and empirical contributions. However, the major part of the empirical advances is on the economic effects of terrorism, its origins, and drivers. ...

The Economics of Security: A European Perspective ; Introduction

Entrepreneurship, Windfall Gains and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Germany

We investigate the link between the propensity to become an entrepreneur and the exogenous release from financial constraints in Germany. This is defined in terms of the movement from employment to self-employment on receipt of a financial windfall. A theoretical framework developing Evans and Jovanovic (1989) is set up and tested with panel data from German households. The results show that financial ...

Virtual Assisted Self Interviewing (VASI): An Expansion of Survey Data Collection Methods to Virtual Worlds by Means of VDCI

Changes in communication technology have allowed for the expansion of data collection modes in survey research. The proliferation of the computer has allowed the creation of web and computer assisted auto-interview data collection modes. Virtual worlds are a new application of computer technology that once again expands the data collection modes by VASI (Virtual Assisted Self Interviewing). The Virtual ...

Government Ownership of Banks, Institutions and Economic Growth

We present new cross-country evidence that reveals that during 1995-2007, government ownership of banks has been robustly associated with higher long-run growth rates. We also show that previous results suggesting that government ownership of banks is associated with lower long-run growth rates are not robust to conditioning on more "fundamental" determinants of economic growth.

What Drives Regional Business Cycles? The Role of Common and Spatial Components

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. The results obtained by a panel model with spatial effects indicate that the impact of national business cycles has been rather stable over the past two decades. A tendency for convergence in business cycles often detected in country data is not confirmed at the regional level. The pattern of synchronization across ...

How Helpful Are Spatial Effects in Forecasting the Growth of Chinese Provinces?

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real gross regional product (GRP) for each of the 31 Chinese provinces simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, we use panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence between the GRP growth rates. In addition, the possibility of spatial effects being different for different groups of provinces (Interior ...

The Russian Regional Convergence Process: Where Is It Leading

This paper investigates income convergence among Russian regions between 1998 and 2006. It makes two major contributions to the literature on regional convergence in Russia. First, it identifies spatial regimes using the exploratory spatial data analysis. Second, it examines the impact of spatial effects on the convergence process. Our results show that the overall speed of regional convergence in ...

Combating "Maritime Terrorism" off the Coast of Somalia

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the international naval mission in the Gulf of Aden from 2008 to 2010, both in terms of its counter-piracy and its counter-terrorism objectives. We draw on arguments developed in the literature of terrorism and law and economics, detailed statistical analyses and a large number of in depth interviews. Counter-piracy operations are a qualified success: their ...

Infant Mortality and Adult Stature in Spain

This paper presents new evidence concerning the relationship between environmental conditions in the year of birth (as reflected in the infant mortality rate (IMR) and gross domestic product per capita) and adult health (adult height). We perform an analysis across Spanish regions for cohorts born between 1961 and 1980, a period when the country underwent a socio-economic and political transformation. ...

Natural Hazard Insurance in Europe: Tailored Responses to Climate Change Are Needed

This paper provides an overview of the existing systems of natural hazard insurance in Europe, their structural characteristics and peculiarities. It also discusses the difficulties of adaptation of these systems to climate change and the growing number of natural disasters. Using Germany, Austria and Switzerland as examples, the paper demonstrates that based on the status quo, the Swiss monopoly insurance ...

Introduction to a Special Issue: The Internationalisation of Services - Evidence from Micro Data

Comparability of EU-SILC Survey and Register Data: The Relationship among Employment, Earnings and Poverty

The Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) provide an up-to-date data source for the comparative analysis of income, material deprivation and poverty. At the European Union (EU) level, these data have become a standard source for social reporting. Yet the specific approaches to data collection in EU-SILC vary widely from one country to the next. One of the major differences is that some ...

Changes in Compulsory Schooling and the Causal Effect of Education on Health: Evidence from Germany

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969. These law changes generate exogenous variation in years of schooling both across states and over time. We find evidence for a strong and ...

Spillovers of Institutional Change in Africa

While previous research has looked at the determinants of the quality of institutions, not much research has been done that looks at the determinants of institutional change. This paper examines what determines the probability of an improvement in political freedoms. Several path-dependent variables, such as the history of political freedom, are clearly influential. In addition to that, economic openness ...

Virtual Life Satisfaction

We study life satisfaction data from the 2005 World Values Survey and a 2009 survey of users of the virtual world Second Life. Second Life users do not have the same demographic profile as the general population, but the differences are not as large as we expected. The mechanisms and causes of life satisfaction seem to be similar in the two samples. Among Second Life users, satisfaction with their ...

Holding a Candle to Innovation in Concentrating Solar Power Technologies: A Study Drawing on Patent Data

Improved understanding of the innovative pathways of renewable energy technologies is vital if we are to make the transition to a low carbon economy. This study presents new evidence on innovation and industry dynamics in concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies. Though CSP is undergoing a renaissance, existing innovation studies have explored innovative activity in solar technologies in general, ...

Erwerbskarrieren in Ostdeutschland - 20 Jahre nach der Deutschen Einheit und darüber hinaus

Die Arbeitslosigkeit in Ostdeutschland bewegt sich seit Jahren auf einem doppelt so hohen Niveau wie in Westdeutschland bei gleichzeitigem Rückgang der sozialversicherungspflichtigen Beschäftigung. Wir analysieren diese Entwicklungen für einzelne Geburtskohorten der Jahrgänge 1937-1971. Dazu schätzen wir auf der Basis des Sozio-oekonomischen Panel (SOEP) für Männer und Frauen differenziert nach Bildungsgruppen ...

Trade Creation and the Status of FTAs: Empirical Evidence from East Asia

East Asia has been considered a latecomer with respect to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Since the turn of the last century, however, FTAs with East Asian participation have seen an intra- and extra-regional expansion. Many trade initiatives have been proposed, negotiated or even implemented. This introduces interesting perspectives for the analysis of trade agreements regarding their anticipatory trade ...