Axel Dreher

TL;DR: This paper revisited the findings from recent cross-country studies on the institutions-happiness association and found that the conclusions reached by previous studies are fairly sensitive to the specific measure of "happiness" used.

TL;DR: This paper analyzed whether the educational and professional background of a head of government matters for the implementation of market-liberalizing reforms, finding that entrepreneurs, professional scientists, and trained economists are significantly more reform oriented than union executives.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate whether foreign aid from China is prone to political capture in aid-receiving countries and examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the birth regions of political leaders, controlling for indicators of need and various fixed effects.

TL;DR: The authors analyzed whether globalization has indeed influenced the composition of government expenditures in 60 countries and found that globalization did not influence the composition in a notable way, and showed that globalization-induced welfare state retrenchment is potentially mitigated by citizens' preferences to be compensated for the risks of globalization.

TL;DR: The authors analyzed whether globalization has influenced the OECD countries' social and overall spending as well as their implicit tax rates on labor, consumption and capital, and found that globalization did not decrease the leeway for independent economic policy.