The aim of this paper is to discuss excess comovements for the Euro/US dollar and British pound/US dollar exchange rates, i.e. we look for comovements of exchange rates which are stronger than implied by fundamentals. The results of the empirical analysis give evidence that excess comovements...

We investigate whether elected members of the United Nations Security Council receive favorable treatment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), analyzing panel data on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the period of 1992 to...

We analyze the spread of policies dealing with international trafficking in human beings. Arguing that countries are unlikely to make independent choices, we identify pressure, externalities and learning or emulation as plausible diffusion mechanisms for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking...

The Anti-trafficking Protocol reflects the interests of the major powers. Due to the high costs of compliance, countries will strategically select certain obligations to comply, which can satisfy the major powers with smaller costs. Among the three main obligations of the Protocol - prevention,...

Trust in the ECB has fallen to unprecedented lows in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Up to the start of the recession in 2008, trust levels in the ECB were moderately high and trust in the ECB was not affected by business cycle variables such as growth and inflation. This changed...

This study explores a basic idea in political economy: Trading money for political influence. Our focus is at the level of international institutions, where governments may exploit their influence in one organization to gain leverage over another. In particular, we consider the lending...

Noting that "one size does not fit all" in the case of the finance-growth (FG) nexus, a growing body of literature has recently focused on uncovering economic conditions under which financial development could be beneficial (detrimental) to economic development. We look into these conditions by...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis trust, in the European Central Bank (ECB) has reached an historical low. Taking panel data and using a fixed effects DFGLS estimation for a 12–country sample over the time period 1999 to 2011 with a total of 312 observations, this paper detects a...

The past literature found evidence for the presence of endogeneity issues due to individuals' heterogeneity and omitted time-varying variables in the relationship between income and life satisfaction on the micro-level for the UK (Powdthavee (2010)). The aim of the present contribution is to put...