Does official aid pave the road for private foreign investment or does it suffocate private initiative by diverting resources towards unproductive activities? In this paper we explore this question using data for a large number of developing and emerging economies. Controlling for countries'...

This paper empirically analyzes the political, institutional and economic sources of public deficit volatility. Using the system-GMM estimator for linear dynamic panel data models and a sample of 125 countries analyzed from 1980 to 2006, we show that higher public deficit volatility is typically...

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) projects are assumed to be accompanied by potential external effects - so-called FDI spillovers - which are supposed to affect productivity levels of other firms in a host country. Empirical results on this topic are inconclusive and most studies focus on one...

This survey documents the different arguments discussed in the academic literature on whether and how economic inequality and the emergence and stability of democratic political systems are connected. While early research in this domain has often focused on new and emerging democracies, this...

Der Wirtschaftsstandort Iran bietet ausländischen Investoren gute Investitionsmöglichkeiten. Zudem sind die institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen für Auslandsinvestitionen in diesem Land seit der Implementierung des neuen Investitionsgesetzes in 2001 günstig. Der Zufluss der...

The collapse of the Soviet Union revealed big productivity, structural and technological gaps between between its economy and Western markets. The latter made it difficult to reorient its members trade flows towards new Western and Asian markets. An alternative solution was to rebuild up...

This paper addresses the puzzle that public services in some developing countries, especially in Africa, are poor despite large public expenditure. The intertemporal model here studies a government’s optimal choice between redistribution and public investment. Ethnic diversity and political...