On March 11, 2011, the strongest ever recorded in Japan earthquake occurred which triggered a powerful tsunami and caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima nuclear plant. The latter was a “manmade” disaster having immense impacts on people’s life, health, and property, infrastructure, supply...

Urban centers are drivers of economic growth. Normal principles of economics apply here and due to economies of scale, because of larger population, synergies take place. In hunger of self-interest, and if system fails to optimize benefits vis-à-vis cost, the cities become hell rather than...

I will address eight common claims about bitcoin: 1. Physical bitcoins exist; 2. The founder of bitcoin is a person called Satoshi Nakamoto; 3. Bitcoin is mainly used for criminal activity; 4. A lack of security plagues bitcoin; 5. Mining is a waste of energy; 6. Bitcoin too small today to be an...

Aid for Trade supports developing and least-developed countries in building their trade capacity and in increasing their exports by turning market access opportunities into market presence. It does so by addressing four key areas: trade policy & regulations; economic infrastructure; building...

This paper looks at the various trade policies WTO Members have put into place to foster women's economic empowerment. The analysis below is based on the information provided by WTO Members as part of their Trade Policy Review (TPRs) process from 2014 to 2018. Reports from the WTO Secretariat,...

Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...

This paper documents the influence of diaspora networks of high-skilled individuals - i.e., inventors - on international technological collaborations. By means of gravity models, it studies the determinants of the internationalization of inventive activity between a group of industrialized...

We analyze the distribution of economic activity across space for different types of activity and different levels of aggregation. Not only is this distribution highly uneven (independently of the type of activity and level of aggregation), it is also remarkably regular regarding its size...

In this paper we study the impact of diversity on regional growth by extending the existing literature in such that we differentiate between industry diversity and human capital diversity. In order to measure human capital diversity we construct a regional measure based on individual...

Evidence indicates that house prices have become somewhat more synchronized during this century, likely reflecting more correlated movements in long-term interest rates and macroeconomic cycles that are related to trends in globalization and international portfolio diversification. Nevertheless,...