We examine environmental factors as potential determinants of international migration. We distinguish between unexpected short-run factors, captured by natural disasters, as well as long-run climate change and climate variability. Building on a simple neo-classical model we use a panel dataset...

We argue that societies with a stronger tendency towards postmaterialist life goals tilt the tax structure towards personal income taxes and away from corporate taxation. We provide empirical evidence for this correlation in OECD countries. To address endogeneity issues we then use an...

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple...

The size-wage effect is well documented in the empirical literature, and typical attempts of explanation center on the supply side, using variations of the human capital approach, perhaps combined with institutional theories. With conclusive evidence of its source yet to emerge, an alternative...

This paper presents homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden from 1903 to 2003 using individual tax returns data. We find that Swedish top incomes have developed more similarly to the US, Canada and the UK than to other continental European countries when capital gains are included. The...

This paper studies the effects of financial liberalization and banking crises on growth. It shows that financial liberalization spurs on average economic growth. Banking crises are harmful for growth, but to a lesser extent in countries with open financial systems and good institutions. The...

In this note, we consider the contradiction between the fact that the best fit for the UK consumption data in Davidson et al. (1978) is obtained using an equation with an intercept but without an error correction term, whereas the equation with error correction and without the intercept has...

This paper shows that geographical investor heterogeneity strongly influences sovereign risk. While standard sovereign debt models mainly attribute the absence of sovereign defaults to foreign creditor retaliation, a new theoretical literature argues that domestic creditors also affect borrowing...

Recent empirical growth literature suggests that cultural factors play a decisive role in economic development, while empirical evidence for their impact on government activity remains scant. In this paper, we conjecture based on Weber's Protestant Ethics that 'Protestant values' such as...

Would you go to the dentist more often if it were free? Observational data is here used to analyze the impact of full-coverage insurance on dental care utilization using different identification strategies. The challenge of assessing the bite of moral hazard without an experimental study design...