Labor and product market regulations affect the unemployment rate of a country without doubt. Econometricians, however, have yet to establish an unequivocal significance of this impact. Model mis-specification, one of the main underlying problems, is overcome by adopting a Bayesian Model Averaging approach. I apply this method to a panel data set that covers 17 OECD countries for the time perio...

This paper extends my previous analysis of the causal relationship of GDP and energy use in the USA in the post-war period. A majority of the relevant variables are integrated justifying a cointegration analysis. The results show that cointegration does occur and that energy input cannot be excluded from the cointegration space. The results are plausible in terms of macroeconomic dynamics. The ...

Growth, History, or Institutions? What Explains State Fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa We explore the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for a wide range of economic, demographic, geographic and istitutional regressors, we find that institutions, and in particular the civil liberties index and the number of revolutions, are the main determinants of fragility, even...

This paper intends to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and in which interesting directions it might develop. First, the current state of the research on happiness in economics is briefly discussed. We emphasize the potential of happiness research in testing competing theories of individual behavior. Second, the crucial issue of causality is taken up illus...

The Easterlin hypothesis emphasizes the effect of relative cohort size on fertility. Models based on the Easterlin hypothesis have performed well in explaining time series fertility data, although these results have been for long historical time series and have typically been restricted to single country studies. These models are not adequate to determine if the hypothesis still holds and if th...

【Abstract】This paper analyzes influence of an additional referee on number of fouls by using the data from Women’s Japan Basketball League (WJBL) in order to examine whether number of police officers affects the crime rate. For the season of 2010-2011, the upper league of the WJBL introduced 3 referees system for the adaption of the international standard. Using this natural experiment, the Dif...

Available online 30 April 2015 This paper investigates cointegration relationships and Granger causality nexus in a trivariate framework among economic growth, inflation, and stock market development. Utilizing three measures of stock market development and employing a panel vector autoregressive model, we study 34 OECD countries over the time period of 1960–2012. Our novel panel-data estimatio...

We use a panel of 155 countries for 1970-2010 to study (two-way) causality between government spending, revenue and growth. Our results suggest the existence of weak evidence supporting causality from expenditures or revenues to GDP per capita and provide evidence supporting Wagner’s Law. JEL: C23, E62, H50.

The main concern of this paper is to answer the question of the determinants of FDI inflows to West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The literature on FDI recognizes not only the existence of gaps between domestic savings and investment in most developing countries but also that FDI constitutes a cure capable to bring the latest technology and management know-how into these countrie...

There is increasing interest in the ‘‘economics of happiness’’, reflected by the number of articles that are appearing in mainstream economics journals that consider subjective well-being (SWB) and its determinants. This paper provides a detailed review of this literature. It focuses on papers that have been published in economics journals since 1990, as well as some key reviews in psychology a...