Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, we exploit a natural experiment, the stationing of thousands of diplomats...

The paper presents a political economy model linking terror and governments' respect for human rights. Using panel data for 111 countries over the period 1973-2002, we then empirically analyze whether and to what extent terror affects human rights - measured by three indices covering a wide...

What are the main causes of international terrorism? The lessons from the surge of academic research that followed 9/11 remain elusive. The careful investigation of the relative roles of economic and political conditions did little to change the fact that existing econometric estimates diverge...

There are many stories of democracy but little consensus over which variables robustly determine its emergence and survival. We apply extreme bounds analysis to test the robustness of 59 factors proposed in the literature, evaluating over 3 million regressions. The most robust determinants of...

Ausgangspunkt für Forderungen nach einer Einführung von Kapazitätsmechanismen im deutschen Strommarkt ist die Beobachtung, dass das gegenwärtige Investitionsverhalten der Marktakteure zu einem unzureichenden Niveau der Stromversorgungssicherheit führen könnte. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag...

Die wirtschaftlichen und politischen Herausforderungen im Energiebereich sind komplex. Die zunächst so erfolgreich gestartete Energiewende ist ins Stolpern geraten. Das europäische Zertifikatesystem, das Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz und die Energiewende müssen nun vor allem kosteneffizient neu...

We study deterrence in sequential move conflicts, modeled as a contest. We bias the model in favor of peace by assuming that under complete information deterrence is achieved and peace prevails. We show that under incomplete information about states' types (resolve) the chances of deterrence...

In July 2008, the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) launched North America’s first revenue-neutral carbon tax reform. The tax, which applied to all combustion sources of all fossil fuels, was introduced at a rate of CAD 10 per tonne of CO2, with a schedule for annual increases of CAD...

Beginning in late 2008, Ireland experienced a fiscal crisis. This resulted in November 2010 in agreement between the Irish government and the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – known collectively as ‘the Troika’ – whereby the latter...

The goal of this paper is twofold: First, to develop an estimable model of legislative politics in the US Congress, second, to provide a greater understanding of the objectives behind the New Deal. In the theoretical model, the distribution of federal funds across regions of the country is the...