This paper tests a geography and growth model using regional data for Europe, the US, and Japan. We set up a standard geography and growth model with a poverty trap and derive a log-linearized growth equation that corresponds directly to a threshold regression technique in econometrics. In...

Applying the general question of aid effectiveness to the sector of education, this paper reveals an overall positive effect of development assistance on primary enrolment. However, even the most optimistic estimates clearly show that at any realistic rate of growth, aid will never be able to...

Variations of bilateral aid flows are difficult to explain on the basis of official development objectives or recipient need. At the example of US aid to Pakistan, this paper suggests alternative political economic explanations, notably the relevance of ethnic lobbying and the relevance of US...

An important feature of aid to developing countries is that it is given to the government. As a result aid has the potential to affect budgetary behaviour. Although the (albeit limited) aid-growth literature has addressed the effect of aid on policy, it has tended to neglect the effect of aid on...

Donor agencies invest considerable financial and human resources to evaluate the outcome of their development activities. To derive institutional conditions conducive to an efficient use of these resources, we develop a multi-level principal-agent model focusing on the various interests of the...

This paper discusses a large-scale factor model for the German economy. Following the recent literature, a data set of 121 time series is used via principal component analysis to determine the factors, which enter a dynamic model for German GDP. The model is compared with alternative univariate...

Main topics of the following analysis are the development of spatial structure and the question whether the economic disparities between agglomerations and peripheral areas will con- or diverge. Frequently, economic disparities are measured by per capita income. Because of the relationship...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that emphasize the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

The paper proposes a technique to jointly tests for groupings of unknown size in the cross sectional dimension of a panel and estimates the parameters of each group, and applies it to identifying convergence clubs in income per-capita. The approach uses the predictive density of the data,...