Amjad Naveed

Technology Spillovers and International Borders: A Spatial Econometric Analysis

ABSTRACT The borders of the EU are open for the movement of resources but still there can be some strong negative effects of international borders on productivity and knowledge spillovers compared to the internal regional borders. These negative effects could be due to language barriers, cultural differences, local rules and regulation, legal issues, property rights, etc. These effects of international borders have an economic significance that need to be controlled when analyzing the regional knowledge spillovers. This aspect related to international borders has not been fully taken into account in the existing literature related to knowledge spillovers, therefore, ignoring this effect might under- or overestimate the effect of knowledge and technology spillovers. The results show that technology and knowledge spillovers are mainly coming from internal neighbor regions only, whereas spillovers across the international borders are statistically insignificant. Moreover, the results show that not properly incorporating border effects will lead to inaccurate estimates of the spillovers.

Can Religion Explain Cross-Country Differences in Inequality: A Global Perspective

This paper investigates the relationship between different religious groups and income inequality. In particular, we examine whether different religious groups (Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism) have an impact on income inequality in a global perspective. Furthermore, this paper also sheds light on the effects of major religious sub-groups (Christianity and Islam) on income inequality. Using data for 130 countries from 1970 to 2013, we estimate a panel data model, controlling for religious beliefs, savings rate, arable land rate and age-dependency ratio. Our results indicate that religion plays an important role in explaining income inequality. In particular, we found that Islam and Judaism reduce income inequality while in general, Christianity and Buddhism increases inequality. However, the effects from sub-groups of Christianity on inequality are mixed; in particular, Anglican and Orthodox significantly reduce inequality while the effect from Catholic and Protestant is opposite. These findings are robust to different measures of inequality and alternative estimation techniques that take care of endogeneity.

Labour mobility and local employment: building a local employment base from labour mobility?

ABSTRACT Labour mobility and local employment: building a local employment base from labour mobility? Regional Studies. Do labour inflows contribute to job opportunities for local residents? This question is analysed based on a three-step instrumental variables (IV) estimation procedure including two-way fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity by using unique panel data for the period 2006–11 in Denmark. The results show that labour inflows are crucial for employment opportunities in peripheral areas, but appear to have no effects closer to urban centres. Furthermore, the findings highlight the importance of inflows of specific skills and cross-sectoral dependencies in skill dynamics. This stresses the importance of considering policies promoting mobility to ensure the employment basis in peripheral areas.