The empirical literature is inconclusive about whether a country’s democratization has a long-lasting impact on former supporters or opponents of the bygone regime. With newly available individual-level data of former residents of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), we analyze how...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) provide opportunities for a more flexible and market-based provision of public services. At the same time, they may impair fiscal transparency and offer politicians discretion in the presence of strict fiscal rules if these only constrain the core udget. Using a...

EU declares to provide support for the rural and poor regions of its member states. However, recent research shows that past EU budget allocations (in EU-15) can be attributed to measures of the distribution of voting power in the Council of Ministers deciding on the bulk of EU spending. A...

The Borda Count (BC) is a positional voting procedure fairly often applied in nonpolitical choice settings. It has a usual mixture of good and bad theoretical properties. It is monotonic and consistent and excludes the election of an eventual Condorcet loser. It, however, does not necessarily...

The member states have self-interested objectives and they use their voting power in the Council of Ministers (CM) to maximize their shares from the EU budget, whereas European Parliament (EP) uses its power to support benevolent objectives and equality between member states. Given the current...

It is a constant topic of debate how the European Union (EU) spends the money it collects from its member states. This paper supports the idea that the EU budget battle involves one-shot games that have persistent impacts on the budget allocations. In one way or the other, the member states are...

Techniques based on using principal eigenvectors of matrices representing binary relations of sets of alternatives are commonly used in social sciences, bibliometrics, and web search engines. In most applications the binary relations can be represented by a directed graph and the question of...

We study a Baron-Ferejohn (1989) type of bargaining model to which we append an investment stage. As long as no agreement is reached, a new proposer is selected randomly from the player set. A proposal is accepted if at least q players accept it. Prior to the bargaining stage, players may make...

We derive a necessary and a sufficient condition for Nash implementation with a procedurally fair mechanism. Our result has a nice analogue with the path-braking result of Maskin [Nash equilibrium and welfare optimality, Rev. Econ. Stud. 66 (1999) 23-38.], and therefore, it allows us to give a...