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Does Export Concentration Cause Volatility?
(2011)KOF Working PapersThis paper investigates the causal influence of export concentration on measures of aggregate volatility. Geographically disadvantaged countries often have a concentrated export structure which makes them more vulnerable to external shocks. Identifying causal effects of export concentration on volatility faces severe problems of endogeneity, however. Based on a gravity approach, we suggest an inequality decomposition method which allows ...Working Paper -
International business cycles
(2011)KOF Working PapersThis paper first discusses concepts, definitions and theoretical explanations for international business cycles. This is followed by an overview of previous empirical studies. We then argue that for ex post analyses the output gap is a univariate quantification of the business cycle that is comparable across space and time and readily available (or rather computable from GFP series), which recommends its use for our purposes. Based on an ...Working Paper -
Nowcasting Private Consumption with TV Sentiment
(2011)KOF Working PapersWe perform principal components analyses of the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment and TV sentiment in order to gain information on their structure and information content. By introducing the new sentiment variable TV sentiment, gathered from sentiment from statements from over 10,000 TV news broadcasts in the United States, we nd that TV sentiment adds great value in nowcasting private consumption. We further nd that TV ...Working Paper -
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Competition and Persistence of R&D
(2011)KOF Working PapersThis paper investigates the R&D persistence of R&D active firms in different markets with different intensities of competition, based on firm-level panel data for the period 1996-2008. In a dynamic setting of the empirical model it turns out that persistence is strongly related to market competition (measured by the number of principal competitors). Persistence of R&D expenditures is more likely to be observed in markets with few principal ...Working Paper -
No country for old men
(2011)KOF Working PapersThis paper develops a model of the relationship between the age of a dictator and economic growth. In the model a dictator must spread the resources of the economy over his reign but faces mortality and political risk. The model shows that if the time horizon of the dictator decreases, either due to an increase of mortality risk or political risk, the economic growth rate decreases. The model predictions are supported by empirical evidence ...Working Paper -
Dynamic effects and structural change under environmental regulation in a CGE model with endogenous growth
(2011)Economics Working Paper SeriesWorking Paper -
Optimal monitoring of credit-based emissions trading under asymmetric information
(2011)Economics Working Paper SeriesProject-based emissions trading schemes, like the Clean Development Mechanism, are particularly prone to problems of asymmetric information between project parties and the regulator. In this paper, we extend the general framework on incomplete enforcement of policy instruments to reflect the particularities of credit-based mechanisms. The main focus of the analysis is to determine the regulator’s optimal spot-check frequency given plausible ...Working Paper