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Economic damage from natural hazards can sometimes be prevented and always mitigated. However, private individuals tend to underinvest in such measures due to problems of collective action, information asymmetry and myopic behavior. Governments, which can in principle correct these market failures, themselves face incentives to underinvest in costly disaster prevention policies and damage mitigation regulations.Yet, disaster damage varies greatly across countries. We argue that rational actors will invest more in trying to prevent and mitigate damage the larger a country's propensity to experience frequent and strong natural hazards. Accordingly, economic loss from an actually occurring disaster will be smaller the larger a country's disaster propensity -holding everything else equal, such as hazard magnitude, the country's total wealth and per capita income. At the same time, damage is not entirely preventable and smaller losses tend to be random. Disaster propensity will therefore have a larger marginal effect on larger predicted damages than on smaller ones. We employ quantile regression analysis in a global sample to test these predictions, focusing on the three disaster types causing the vast majority of damage worldwide: earthquakes, floods and tropical cyclones.3

This document is the author's final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. Some differences between this version and the published version may remain. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1831633

To increase inward foreign direct investment (FDI), policy-makers increasingly resort to the ratification of double taxation treaties (DTTs). However, the effectiveness of DTTs in inducing higher FDI is still open to debate, as the empirical evidence of existing studies is anything but conclusive. In contrast to earlier approaches, we use a largely unpublished dataset on bilateral FDI stocks, covering a much larger and more representative sample of host and source countries. Controlling for standard determinants of FDI and employing various econometric specifications, our results indicate that DTTs do lead to higher FDI stocks and that the effects are substantively important as well.3

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Economic damage from natural hazards can sometimes be prevented and always mitigated. However, private individuals tend to underinvest in such measures due to problems of collective action, information asymmetry and myopic behavior. Governments, which can in principle correct these market failures, themselves face incentives to underinvest in costly disaster prevention policies and damage mitigation regulations.Yet, disaster damage varies greatly across countries. We argue that rational actors will invest more in trying to prevent and mitigate damage the larger a country's propensity to experience frequent and strong natural hazards. Accordingly, economic loss from an actually occurring disaster will be smaller the larger a country's disaster propensity -holding everything else equal, such as hazard magnitude, the country's total wealth and per capita income. At the same time, damage is not entirely preventable and smaller losses tend to be random. Disaster propensity will therefore have a larger marginal effect on larger predicted damages than on smaller ones. We employ quantile regression analysis in a global sample to test these predictions, focusing on the three disaster types causing the vast majority of damage worldwide: earthquakes, floods and tropical cyclones.3

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We account for the competition for export markets among the donor countries of foreign aid by analyzing spatial dependence in aid allocation. We employ sector-specific aid data, distinguishing between first and second stage decisions on the selection of recipient countries and the amount of aid allocated to selected recipients. We find that the five largest donors react to aid giving by other donors with whom they compete in terms of exporting goods and services to a specific recipient country at both stages of their allocation of aid for economic infrastructure and productive sectors. By contrast, evidence for export competition driving aid allocation is lacking for more altruistic donors and for aid in social infrastructure. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayKeywords: Aid allocation, sector-specific aid, export competition, spatial dependence. Development Assistance Committee (DAC) by introducing spatial lags that link donor countries according to the extent to which a potential aid recipient country is of similar importance to them as a market for their exports. In other words, the more two donors export to a similar set of recipient countries, the more they compete in their exports with each other and, as a consequence, the more their aid allocation is supposed to spatially depend on each other. Importantly, we assess aid allocation by employing sector-specific aid data, as the impact of export competition is expected to matter more for aid projects in economic infrastructure and production sectors than for aid projects in social infrastructure such as education and health. JEL classification: F35In our estimations, we distinguish between donors' decisions on (i) the selection of recipient countries, and (ii) conditional on being selected, on how much aid to allocate to each recipient. Disaggregating between groups of donors and types of aid, we find export driven spatial dependence among the five largest DAC donors at both stages of their allocation of aid for economic infrastructure and production sectors. This stands in contrast to aid for social infrastructure for which there is no such evidence. The group of like-minded and more altruistic donors does not compete in their aid allocation; rather, they seem to specialize in the amount of aid allocated to social infrastructure.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents reasons for competition among donors based on their interests in the exports market and the type of aid ...

Existing refugees in a destination country from the same source country reduce the uncertainty faced by subsequent asylum migrants since existing refugees can provide information and assistance. We argue that such network effects extend beyond the borders of specific source countries. Potential asylum migrants might also be able to draw on networks from geographically proximate as well as linguistically similar countries and from countries having previously been colonized by the same destination country, thus creating spatial dependence in asylum migration among source countries. Many destination countries meanwhile aspire to reduce the inflow of migrants by tightening their asylum policies. Target countries which restrict their policies relatively more than other destinations deflect some asylum migrants to geographically proximate destination countries, thus creating spatial dependence among target countries. We find evidence for both types of spatial dependence in our global analysis of asylum migration.However, while statistically significant, the degree of spatial dependence among target countries is modest. On the source side, there is evidence for modest spatial dependence among linguistically similar countries and no evidence for spatial dependence among countries which were previously colonized by the same destination country. By contrast, we find substantial spatial dependence among geographically proximate source countries.2