This paper examines the Lucas Paradox and the Allocation Puzzle of international capital flows referring to a panel data set of EMU countries and major industrialized and emerging economies. Overall, the results do not provide evidence in favour of the Lucas Paradox and the Allocation Puzzle....

A typical loan offer is a differentiated product with various negotiated characteristics (maturity, amount, timing, collateral, disclosure requirements) which involve costs that go beyond the mere interest rate. Taking into account all costs, a firm chooses the cost minimizing loan offer. Based...

We analyze the determinants of interest rates on long-term government bonds within the Eurozone to assess whether the recent divergence in interest rates is attributable to changes in common economic fundamentals. First, we show that the panel approach, mostly employed by existing literature on...

In this paper we provide a new explanation for the increase in world trade over the last two decades. We show analytically in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms that a fall in variable offshoring costs boosts trade in differentiated final goods through an intra-industry...

In the light of climate change, transport systems become increasingly stressed by extreme weather and gradual climatic changes, resulting in direct costs which arise in the affected sector as well as indirect costs due to economic spill-over effects. To attenuate these costs, sector specific...

Intra-EMU external imbalances in the pre-crisis period up to 2008 are traditionally explained by EMU-oriented factors, e.g. euro-related financial integration. Chen et al. (2013) also emphasize external trade shocks, such as the competitive challenge of emerging Asia and oil exporters to...

Harvest costs can reduce the incentive to overexploit a renewable resource stock, particularly when costs are stock dependent. This paper compares different types of harvest costs in a renewable resource based overlapping generations (OLG) model in which resource harvest competes with commodity...

The increasing availability of geospatial data (i.e., exact longitudes and latitudes for each house) has the potential to improve the quality of house price indexes. It is not clear though how best to use this information. We show how geospatial data can be included as a nonparametric spline...

An Address to Karl-Franzens Universitat, Graz; In Celebration of the Distinguished Career of o.Univ. Prof. Mag. Dr. Heinz D Kurz

In an influential paper entitled “David Ricardo’s Discovery of Comparative Advantage”, which was published in HOPE (Vol. 34, 2002), Roy J. Ruffin attempted to reconstruct the circumstances of Ricardo’s discovery of the law of comparative advantage. Ruffin’s article has inspired a...