Large-scale land acquisitions, or land grabs, concentrate in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendly setting caused by a weak institutional framework. We argue that corrupt elites exploit this given institutional set-up to strike deals with international investors...

Since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington D.C., the fight against international terrorism has been a dominant issue in the political arena. Policy-makers (still) face the challenge to develop sound strategies for fighting this type of terrorist activity. Unfortunately, there is no...

Depending on the design of the domestic pension system and the type of immigrants, voters will decide differently on immigration policy. In this paper, we investigate the voting outcome of three groups of heterogenous voters (skilled workers, unskilled workers, and retirees) under Beveridgian or...

Increasing labor mobility has an impact on all redistributive policy measures undertaken by national governments. This paper focuses on intergenerational redistribution, in particular PAYG financed public pension systems, and surveys some of the recent literature on this topic. Two different...

A major concern in Western Europe and especially in Germany is that with the EU eastern enlargement inflows of workers occur, which will be net beneficiaries of the domestic social security systems. We introduce a model and present evidence by comparing pension systems in the main source and...

This paper analyzes the impact of migration on destination-country corruption levels. Capitalizing on a comprehensive dataset consisting of annual immigration stocks of OECD countries from 207 countries of origin for the period 1984 - 2008, we explore different channels through which corruption...

We examine the role of market-capitalism in anti-American terrorism, differentiating between level- and rate-of-change-effects associated with market-capitalist development and their respective relationship with anti-U.S. violence. Using panel data for 149 countries between 1970 and 2007, we...

In this paper, we analyse how increasing student migration from a less developed to a developed country alters education policy in the developed country, and how it affects human capital and welfare in the two countries. We argue that a higher permanent migration probability, i.e., a higher...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? Or does it have unintended consequences for U.S. security? To answer these questions, we estimate the effect of U.S. military aid on anti-American terrorism for a sample of 174 countries between 1968 and 2018. We find that higher levels of aid...

Can religiosity sway a society's propensity for violence against outgroups? We first introduce two state-year-level religiosity measures for several pre-Enlightenment European states with the frequencies of religious language in book publications and Christian names of newborns. To identify...