Among a wider public, global market integration is often taken for granted. Products offered in local stores typically originate from all over the world. Goods may also have crossed borders numerous times during the production process. Online marketplaces, such as eBay, facilitate effortless...

Im Rahmen der Diskussion, wie die wirtschaftlichen Schwierigkeiten Europas, insbesondere der Eurozone, zu bewältigen sind, wurde die Forderung nach einem Abbau von Leistungsbilanzüberschüssen laut. Nach Ansicht von Rolf J. Langhammer, Institut für Weltwirtschaft, Kiel, spricht vieles dafür,...

Historically, dissolutions of currency unions are not unusual. I use an annual panel data set covering 245 country pairs that use a common currency (of which 128 are dissolved) from 1948 through 1997 to characterize currency union exits. I find that departures from a currency union tend to occur...

In this paper, I provide a quantitative review of the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities; the meta-analysis combines 515 estimates from 29 studies. I find that the combined estimate of the Zipf coefficient is significantly larger than 1.0. This finding implies that cities are on...