Kiel Institute for the World Economy

About: Kiel Institute for the World Economy is a facility organization based out in Kiel, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Foreign direct investment & Productivity. The organization has 318 authors who have published 1909 publications receiving 42832 citations. The organization is also known as: Institut für Weltwirtschaft an der Universität Kiel.

Drivers of Households’ Land-Use Decisions: A Critical Review of Micro-Level Studies in Tropical Regions

Abstract: This paper reviews 91 recent empirical and theoretical studies that analyzed land-use change at the farm-household level. The review builds on a conceptual framework of land-use change drivers and conducts a meta-analysis. Results show that the conversion of forests into cultivated land or grassland, mainly used for agriculture or ranching, are most frequently analyzed. Only a small number of studies consider the transition of wetlands for agriculture and few cases deal with the conversion from agriculture into protected zones. Moreover, interactions between drivers add to the complexity of land-use change processes. These interrelationships are conditioned by institutions and policies. In particular, the market-oriented reforms adopted by many developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s seem to have had an important role in altering land use, while impacts of more recent policies need to be better explored. Many studies rely on small samples and face problems of internal validity. Despite these weaknesses, the literature points at micro-level economic growth, for example in income and capital endowments, as a strong catalyst of human induced land-use change. However, the review suggests that—across the different studies and cases—there is considerable heterogeneity in the relationship between these factors and land-use change.

The Allocation of German Aid: Self‐interest and Government Ideology

Abstract: We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973–2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and commercial motives matter. When we relate them to the political color of the German government in general, and the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Federal Foreign Office in particular, we find their importance to be at least as strong under the socialist leadership. Socialist leadership decreases the amount of aid commitments, controlled for other factors.

Beyond geopolitics: exploring the impact of the EU and Russia in the “contested neighborhood”

Abstract: While the geopolitical rivalry between the European Union (EU) and Russia over their common neighborhood has increasingly attracted academic and public attention, relatively little is known of its actual influence on domestic institutions and policies. This special issue aims to address this deficit by investigating the joint impact of the EU and Russia on the domestic dynamics of sectoral reform in neighboring countries (NCs) – a key declared goal of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) and the Eastern Partnership (EaP) – in the areas of trade, natural resources, and migration and mobility. It examines the nature of the instruments deployed by the EU and Russia to change domestic reform processes and their impact on domestic actors in the post-Soviet space. This introductory article outlines the key research questions to which answers have been sought by experts in their respective fields and summarizes their key empirical findings in the context of broader conceptual debates. Overall, the contribution...

On the distribution of links in the interbank network: evidence from the e-MID overnight money market

Abstract: Previous literature on statistical properties of interbank networks has reported various power-laws, particularly for the degree distribution (i.e., the distribution of credit links between institutions). In this paper, we revisit data for the Italian interbank network based on overnight loans recorded on the e-MID trading platform during the period 1999–2010 using both daily and quarterly aggregates. In contrast to previous reports, we find no evidence in favor of a power-law characterizing the degree distribution. Rather, the data are best described by negative Binomial distributions. For quarterly data, Weibull, Gamma, and Exponential distributions tend to provide comparable fits. We find similar results when investigating the distribution of the number of transactions, even though in this case, the tails of the quarterly variables are much fatter. The absence of power-law behavior casts doubts on previous claims that these interbank data fall into the category of scale-free networks.