The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules...

That historical inequality can affect long run macroeconomic performance has been argued by a large literature on endogenous inequality using models of indivisibilities in occupational choice, in the presence of borrowing constraints. These models are characterized by a continuum of steady...

Imposing a minimum quality standard (MQS) is conventionally regarded as harmful if firms compete in quantities. This, however, ignores dynamic effects. We show that an MQS can hinder collusion, resulting in dynamic welfare gains that reduce and may even outweigh the usual static losses. Verdicts...

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...

This paper evaluates the economic effects of Turkish EU membership. The evaluation is based on a widely utilized computable general equilibrium model called GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project). Imperfect competition is modelled via assumption of scale economies on non agricultural sectors. The...

This paper deals with the voting rules in the EU Council. Both internal and external impact of the voting rules are evaluated. Internal impact affects the distribution of power among the member states and external impact affects power relations between the main decision-making bodies in the EU....

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...

Economic convergence of the new member states (NMS) of the EU towards the old EU countries (EU-15), not only in terms of real income, but also in nominal terms, is of paramount importance for the whole of the EU. We build a dynamic CGE model, starting from the Balassa-Samuelson two-sector...

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...