Climate research suggests that global warming will lead to more frequent and more extreme natural disasters. Most disasters are local events with effects on local economic growth. Hence, assessing their economic impacts with the help of econometric country-level analysis may lead to biased...

Das am 26. März 1995 in Kraft gesetzte Schengener Abkommen hat einen Europäischen Binnenraum der Personenfreizügigkeit geschaffen und damit ein beispielloses kontinentales Integrationsziel erreicht. Die Bedrohung durch globalen Terrorismus sowie ein starker Anstieg der Flüchtlingszahlen in...

Eine neue empirische Untersuchung des ifo Instituts zeigt, dass selbst bei einem vollständigen Zusammenbruch des Schengen-Raums das BIP in Deutschland lediglich zwischen 4 und 11 Mrd. Euro pro Jahr sinken würde; die weitaus realistischere Wiedereinführung von Kontrollen an den...

Climate research suggests that global warming will lead to more frequent and more extreme natural disasters. Most disasters are local events with effects on local economic activity. Hence, assessing their economic impacts with the help of econometric country-level analysis may lead to biased...

The Schengen Agreement has guaranteed unchecked travel across internal EU borders since 1995. Has it also facilitated trade flows? Our econometric analysis suggests that Schengen has boosted trade by 3% on average (equivalent to a drop in tariffs by 0.7 percentage points). Goods trade is more...

We develop a simple methodology to estimate monthly aggregate supply and demand conditions from bilateral international trade data for about 180 countries and 40 years. We apply our method to measure the short-run effects of natural disasters. In line with theoretical considerations, we find...

Does trade openness cause higher GDP per capita? Since the seminal instrumental variables (IV) estimates of Frankel and Romer [F&R](1999) important doubts have surfaced. Is the correlation spurious and driven by omitted geographical and institutional variables? In this paper, we generalize F&R's...

Growth theory predicts that natural disasters should, on impact, lower GDP per capita. However, the empirical literature does not offer conclusive evidence. Most existing studies use disaster data drawn from damage records of insurance companies. We argue that this may lead to estimation bias as...