infonet-economy

The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven sciences. The access to, compilation and preparation of data from the programmable web for statistical analysis can, however, involve substantial up-front costs for the practical researcher. The R-package RWebData provides a high-level framework that allows data to be easily collected from the…

Having grown in real terms by 60% between 2000 to 2008, extra-EU exports have since stagnated. Stripping out other determinants of EU export growth, the focus here is on the impact of trade distortions imposed by foreign governments since the global economic crisis began. Our econometric analysis implies that crisis-era trade distortions held back EU Member State export growth to…

Are stocks' varying sensitivies to changing investor attention and sentiment priced? Employing internet search-based proxies for both, I find novel results that are consistent with theory. Stocks that co-vary negatively with increased investor attention to the stock market outperform in the following months in a behavior consistent with a risk premium. The pricing of co-…

Not since the London Summit of in April 2009 has protectionism had such a high profile in the run-up to a G20 Leader’s Summit. President Trump’s America First policies have drawn sharp criticism from leaders of other G20 governments. Accusations and counter-accusations of unfair trading practices have become a regular occurrence. So as to shed light on competing claims, this Global…

Russia’s new Concept of the State Migration Policy until 2025 (the CSMP) was approved on 13 June 2012. As the first comprehensive, nationwide document on migration policy in the modern history of Russia, it marks the beginning of a decisive reform of the country’s migration policy by departing from the existing focus on temporary foreign workers. The emphasis of the CSMP is on…

This paper critically evaluates the contention that the implementation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership would adversely affect the centrality of the World Trade Organization. Not only are many Asian nations members of the WTO, but some undertook major reforms to join. Contrary to much existing literature, it is argued here that governments in the Asia-Pacific region should not be…

Existing work on the effects of electoral reforms suggests that decreasing the costs of voting may exacerbate rather than reduce representational biases in turnout. We argue that some electoral institutions may have more uniform mobilization effects than previously thought and exploit the sequential introduction of postal voting in Switzerland to analyze how an exogenous decrease in…