An outbreak of nosocomial infections with Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus occurred in South Korea in May 2015. Spike glycoprotein genes of virus strains from South Korea were closely related to those of strains from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. However, virus strains from South Korea showed strain-specific variations.

Bringing Financial Literacy and Education to Low and Middle Income Countries: The Need to Review, Adjust, and Extend Current Wisdom This paper presents a World Bank led and Russia trust fund financed work program to measure financial capability and the effectiveness of financial education in low and middle income countries. The two activities and their staging have been motivated by the lessons...

Two years have passed since the initial description of the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), yet the epidemic is far from being controlled. The high case fatality rate, the recent steep increase in reported cases, and the potential to cause a global pandemic during the upcoming Hajj season are serious concerns. Although a wealth of information about the pathophysiology, p...

An Evaluation of Public-Sector-Sponsored Continuous Vocational Training Programs in East Germany This study analyses the effects of public-sector-sponsored continuous vocational training and retraining in East Germany after unification with West Germany in 1990. It presents econometric estimates of the average gains from training participation in terms of employment probabilities, earnings, and...

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real incomes in the east have now reached the western level, and investment per capita has been much higher than in the west. However, every third deutschmark spent in the east has been coming from the west, investment in equipment has fallen below the west German per capita level, and ...

We examine job creation and destruction in Eastern and Western Germany for the period of 1999 to 2004, using a large dataset, which enables us to capture clearly entries and exits. There are pronounced differences between the two parts of Germany in terms of magnitude and composition of gross job flows. Considering interaction effects between all variables, weighted regressions show that job cr...

This paper investigates gender differences in the spatial mobility of young adults when initially leaving their parental home. Using individual data from 11 waves (2000-2010) of the SOEP we examine whether female home leavers in East Germany move across greater distances than males and whether these differences are explained by the gender gap in education. Our results reveal that female home le...

On the Post-Unification Development of Public and Private Pay in Germany German post-unification in the 1990s is a period that was marked by substantial economic change, part of which was East German wages building towards the much higher West German levels. This paper studies the public-private pay gap in the fast changing economic and political environment of the 1990s using panel estimation ...