Economists tend to exalt the virtues of free international trade, while politicians are more skeptical. This paper suggests that this is the case because politicians mainly worry about the income distribution effects of trade liberalization, while economists focus on efficiency. Using textbook...

Factor endowments are usually taken as given in trade theoretical analyses of technological change. We use the Deardorff (1974) diagram to show how the steady state capital labor ratio endogenously adjusts to technology shocks in a two-sector small open economy, an effect which has largely been...

We combine the augmented Solow model with the Mincer equation to derive a specification that identifies an education externality within a production function framework. The previous empirical literature has not reached a consensus about the size of the education externality, which is given by...

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transi¬tion to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical strategy is...

Die Herausforderung: Steigender Anpassungsdruck durch die Globalisierung der Märkte Die Globalisierung der Märkte wird in Europa vor allem deswegen als schmerzhaft empfunden, weil sie mehr Flexibilität auf den besonders geschützten Arbeitsmärkten erfordert. Unter Druck geraten vor allem...

The international empirical evidence on the economics of education reveals one central insight and two puzzles, which are all relevant for the case of the Baltic States. The central insight is that social rates of return to education tend to be higher than the social opportunity costs of...

The strikingly different labor market performance of major industrial countries suggests that neither globalization nor skill-biased technological change necessarily result in rising unemployment or declining wages of low-skilled workers. Rather, globalization and technological change cause...

In der Diskussion um die hohe Arbeitslosigkeit geben in der Bundesrepublik die Pessimisten den Ton an. Niedrige Wachstumsraten und ein hohes Rationalisierungstempo, so lautet das Standardargument, würden den Mangel an Arbeitsplätzen weiter vergrößern. Dies muß nicht so sein. Am Beispiel des...

Globalization improves the prospects for developing countries (DCs) to catch up economically with industrialized countries. But not all DCs will automatically benefit from globalization. Some DCs even face the risk of being delinked from the international division of labor. Differences in DC...