There are many apparent similarities between the current political and economic situations of France and Italy. The mainstream view is that at least part of the neo-liberal strategy could be a solution to the economic problems of both variants of the European model of capitalism. However, the...

Applying regressions on a sample of 18 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009 using new indicators, we find that right-wing governments liberalize more the financial sector that left-wing governments. We show that if a left-wing government accepts to liberalize the financial sector, an increase of...

A policy proposal is to abolish the distinction between regular open-end employment contracts and fixed-term contracts and substitute a unique labour contract with a degree of employment protection increasing with tenure. A question on the desirability of the "contrat unique" was included in the...

This paper analyses the French political crisis since the late 1970s by investigating the links between the social structure and the economic policy expectations of the electorate. To this end, data on post-electoral survey are used to estimate structural models of political support to political...

The aim of this article is to analyse the consequences of some structural reforms on the institutional coherence of OECD countries, particularly Continental Europe, and on their economic performance, particularly employment. Because institutions in developed political economies are interrelated...

We consider the problem of finding sufficient conditions for political support of liberal, growth-enhancing policy in a quality-ladders model with heterogeneous agents differing in their endowment of wealth and skills. The policy set is two-dimensional: Agents vote for the level of...

The funding of social protection has strongly evolved in Bismarckian countries : whereas social protection used to rely on social contributions, since the 1990s most of the new expenditures have been funded through taxation, leading to a more balanced mix in the structure of social protection...

Using fixed effects panel data models on a sample of 15 OECD countries over the period 1970-2007, this article explores the linkages between labor-market volatility, financial development and welfare state institutions. We analyze the interacted impact of financial development on the one hand...

This article analyzes the linkages between financial liberalization, labor market institutions and wage inequality for 17 OECD countries over the 1989 to 2005 period. With the help of a fixed effect model with an interacted term, one crucial contribution of this article is to analyze the...

The funding of social protection has strongly evolved in Bismarckian countries : whereas social protection used to rely on social contributions, since the 1990s most of the new expenditures have been funded through taxation, leading to a more balanced mix in the structure of social protection...