We assess the robustness of previous findings on the determinants of terrorism. Using extreme bound analysis, the three most comprehensive terrorism datasets, and focusing on the three most commonly analyzed aspects of terrorist activity, i.e., location, victim, and perpetrator, we re-assess the...

The effects of inter-government fiscal arrangements on variation in regional economic growth are analyzed for Russia, a country with large cross-regional differences and considerable fiscal redistribution. Moreover, fiscal reforms implemented in the first half of 2000s, which followed to some...

This paper empirically investigates the economic and political factors that affect a country's likelihood to sign an arrangement with the IMF and the determinants of the financial size of such a program. Arguably the world and the global financial architecture underwent structural changes after...

This paper explores the factors behind the time path of real spending and revenue in the West German states from 1975 to 2004. The empirical approach stresses robustness and takes into account a large set of economic and political variables. Our results suggest that common economic factors and,...

Higgins et al. (2006), report several statistically significant partial correlates with US per capita income growth. However, Levine and Renelt (1992) demonstrate that such correlations are hardly ever robust to changing the combination of conditioning variables included. We ask, whether the...

Michael Grossman’s human capital model of the demand for health has been argued to be one of the major achievements in theoretical health economics. Attempts to test this model empirically have been sparse, however, and with mixed results. These attempts so far relied on using – mostly...

Dynamic factor models based on Kalman Filter techniques are frequently used to nowcast GDP. This study deals with the selection of indicators for this practice. We propose a two-tiered mechanism which is shown in a case study to produce more accurate nowcasts than a benchmark stochastic process...

We portray determinants of social expenditure in OECD countries. Many theories have been proposed to describe why social expenditure has increased in industrialized countries. Determinants include globalization, political-?institutional variables such as government ideology and electoral...

Initial Public Offerings are, by definition, not seasoned securities. They have not been subjected to valuation by the community of investors. It is often difficult or impossible to forecast their future cash flows because most do not have a long history of publicly disclosed financial...

Hartwig (2008) has presented empirical evidence that the difference between real wage growth and productivity growth at the macroeconomic level is a robust explanatory variable for deflated health-care expenditure growth in OECD countries. In this paper, we test whether this finding is robust to...