Economic damage from natural hazards can sometimes be prevented and always mitigated. However, private individuals tend to underinvest in such measures due to problems of collective action, information asymmetry and myopic behavior. Governments, which can in principle correct these market...

Health policies seek to achieve conflicting objectives. We argue that the objective of saving lives is best served by a careful balancing of fairness and efficiency considerations. Open, fair and equitable access to health care for all citizens will lower overall mortality rates by enabling the...

Traditionally, social scientists perceived causality as regularity. As a consequence, qualitative comparative case study research was regarded as unsuitable for drawing causal inferences since a few cases cannot establish regularity. The dominant perception of causality has changed, however....

This paper adopts and develops the ‘fear of floating’ theory to explain the decision to implement a de facto peg, the choice of anchor currency among multiple key currencies and the role of central bank independence for these choices. We argue that since exchange rate depreciations are...

The recent surge in studies analyzing spatial dependence in political science has gone hand in hand with increased attention paid to the choice of estimation technique. In comparison, specification choice has been relatively neglected, even though it leads to equally, if not more, serious...

Causal inference seeks to identify a causal mechanism and the set of cases for which the causal claim makes sense. It is always based on a specific sample analyzed. However, whether results can be reliably generalized to the population depends on whether the sample represents a true random draw...

In spatial econometrics, W refers to the matrix that weights the value of the spatially lagged variable of other units. As unimportant as it may appear, W specifies, or at least ought to specify, why and how other units of analysis affect the unit under observation. We show that theory must...

Premature mortality exhibits strong spatial patterns in Great Britain. Local authorities that are located further North and West, that are more distant from its political centre London and that are more urban tend to have a higher premature mortality rate. Premature mortality also tends to...

Aim: Despite the country’s explicit political goal to establish equivalent living conditions across Germany, significant inequality continues to exist. We argue that premature mortality is an excellent proxy variable for testing the claim of equivalent living conditions since the root causes...

Learning from natural disasters is predominantly regarded as beneficial: Individuals and governments learn to cope and thereby reduce damage and loss of life in future disasters. We argue against this standard narrative and point to two principal ways in which learning from past disasters can...