Silvio Gesell hypothesized that money depreciation is economically and socially beneficial, ideas that have often been contended. Here I analyze that in a Sidrauski model in which households additionally have a "love of wealth"-motive. It is shown Gesell's claims may be valid in a...

A country's visa policies are widely assumed to have economic consequences. In this short paper, I examine the effect of the ease with which a country's citizens can enter foreign countries on international trade. Using a specification of the gravity model that avoids the endogeneity problems...

This paper estimates the exporter premium in bank lending. We examine credit relationships in Germany, covering all loans of more than 1.5 million euro over the period from 2005 to 2010. Having controlled for a wide range of other firm and bank characteristics, our results indicate that...

Does exchange rate variability affect the speed of external adjustment? We study bilateral trade balances for a sample of 18 European countries over the period from 1948 through 2008. We find that, with the introduction of the euro, trade imbalances among euro area members widened considerably,...

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...

We investigate economic and institutional determinants of ICT infrastructure for a broad cross section ofmore than 100 countries. The ICT variable is constructed from a principal components analysis. The explanatory variables are selected by variants of the Lasso estimator from the machine...

We propose a two-stage procedure for finding realistic benchmarks for nonparametric efficiency analysis. On the first stage the efficient DMUs are figured out by a free disposal hull approach. These benchmarks are directly targeted by directional distance functions and the extent of inefficiency...

In this paper we report the results from a detailed investigation of the shifts of the world production frontier function over the period 1980-2010. Analogous to a radar we implement a novel measurement approach for these shifts using nonparametrically computed productivity measures to scan the...

We apply various refinements of survival regression to assess the results of some basic specifications based on product life cycle theory for the case of a data set of the German automobile industry. The methods applied pay attention to biases in the coefficient estimates and the standard...

Empirical work studying the industry life cycle highlights the role of knowledge in various forms on the durations firms survive in the industry. This research leaves open the influence of historical events, which are reflected in macroeconomic factors like income, inflation, exports and...