German-Pakistani relations cannot be analyzed in isolation of the larger domestic and international trajectories, economic and political, on both sides of the partnership. After a recent democratic power transfer in 2013, Pakistan continues to face complex challenges. The instable security...

Talk about global democracy seems to be fixated on a Reform-Act model of democracy, with 'one person one vote for all affected by the decisions' as for example in a second popularly-apportioned chamber of UN. Politically, that seems wildly unrealistic. But remember that the Reform Acts came very...

The present text aims to analyze the New Development Bank (NDB) established by BRICS as part of the group’s financial architecture, focusing on the main motivations for its creation, ways of acting and governance structure. Although focused on providing credit for infrastructure and...

We offer an analytical framework for studying "pre-emptive" debt exchanges. Countries can tailor a sovereign bankruptcy framework by choosing provisions (or "haircuts") ex ante, but must contend with the market discipline of holdout litigation ex post. Secondary markets play a role in shaping...

In this paper we trace changes in monetary policy caused by institutional amendments in legal acts of central banks. We estimate coefficients of the Taylor Rule for central banks of Sweden, United Kingdom, Switzerland and EU15 to shed some light on monetary policy ex ante and ex post significant...

In this paper we ask if central bank independence could lead to a bad fiscal position of some countries. Introducing autonomous central bank without changing other policy habits could expose the country to greater temptation to borrow money. We think that introducing high degree of CBI creates...

The impact of unconventional monetary policies on exchange rates and its spillovers to other economies is not yet fully understood. In this paper I develop a two-country DSGE model with interbank markets and endogenous default probabilities to analyze the cross-border impacts of unconventional...

We provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on the measurement of democracy and present an extensive update of the Machine Learning indicator of Gründler and Krieger (2016, European Journal of Political Economy). Four improvements are particularly notable: First, we produce a...

This paper deals with the slowdown of economic growth in Europe. For that purpose, we focus on factors that affect the long-run growth path of different economies. Special emphasis is paid to institutional and structural factors that are often assumed to affect aggregate growth: functioning of...