There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

Building on the three-sector-hypothesis, the New Theory of Trade, and the New Economic Geography, we investigate the development of economic structures of European countries over the last three decades using employment data. We test for structural convergence which we analyze on the aggregate...

Latin American countries have lost competitiveness in world markets in comparison to China over the last two decades. The main purpose of this study is to examine the causes of this development. To this end an augmented Dornbusch-type Ricardianʺ model is estimated using panel data. The...

This paper uses monthly survey data for the G7 countries for the time period 1989 - 2007 to explore the link between expectations on nominal wages, prices and unemployment rate as suggested by the traditional and Samuelson-and-Solow-type Phillips curve. Three major findings stand out: First, we...

The paper quantifies the impact of agglomeration economies on the clustering of German firms. Therefore, I use the 2006 Innobarometer survey, which focuses on cluster characteristics and activities of German firms, to empirically identify agglomeration economies derived from the New Economic...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

The aim of the paper is to discuss and to provide evidence for the existence of pecuniary knowledge externalities, considered here as the main cause of positive disequilibrium experience by downstream producers. This last effect, confirmed by the empirical analysis here performed, contrasts the...

This paper studies with disaggregated budget data how expenditures, revenues, and borrowing evolve in municipalities that receive bailouts. It asks whether higher-level governments enforce austerity measures after bailing out indebted municipalities. The sample consists of 421 municipalities in...

Structural innovations in multivariate dynamic systems are typically hidden and often identified by means of a-priori economic reasoning. Under multivariate Gaussian model innovations there is no loss measure available to distinguish alternative orderings of variables or, put differently,...