The complex historical environment, in which constitutional law and policy were established, has at times made it difficult for outsiders to the policy process to understand what forces are really affecting neutrality. While many of the Cold War constraints on neutrality disappeared with the...

This paper identifies view points of the Palestinian telecommunications sector's stakeholders with regard to regulatory independence and analyzes reasons behind the rejection of the 2009 Telecommunications Law that establishes an independent telecommunications regulatory authority. It sheds a...

We take up the widely held view that the observed discrepancy between law on the books and law in action has prevented economic transition and investigate its role for the failure of the Bulgarian credit market. In doing so, we focus on the role of injunctive informal institutions which have...

This paper investigates Palestine's institutional foundations in order to decide on the most appropriate telecommunications regulatory system. It is based on the work of Levy and Spiller's institutional endowment framework. Comments and adjustments to the framework are also discussed and...

By combining our broad panel survey of Japanese adults from 2005 to 2008 and actual cigarette tax data, we investigate how smoking behavior including responses to tax hikes depends on time discounting and its biases, such as hyperbolic discounting and the sign effect. Cigarette consumption...

In view of the finding that debtors are likely to be more obese than nondebtors, we investigate whether interpersonal differences in body mass are, as in the case of debt behavior, related to those in time discounting and time discounting anomalies. The effects of time discounting on body mass...

The failure of the Somali state from 1993 to 2012 represents one of the world's most profound and prolonged cases of state collapse. Initially, education and other government services came to a standstill. With the halt of fighting in some areas, local communities with the support of the United...

Alluding to theories about relative economic status and behavior, this paper studies if relative income mobility, or the intergenerational change in income positions, affects interpersonal trust. Empirically, the question is brought down to an application with US General Social Survey data. For...

In the past few years sustainability and sustainable development have become important concepts widespread over the world. There is no agreement on a common definition of sustainability, but there is a general need to measure and assess sustainability in different geographical and spatial...

This paper explores the individual and joint predictive power of concepts from economics, psychology, and criminology for individual norm enforcement behavior. More specifically, we consider economic preferences (patience and attitudes towards risk), personality traits from psychology (Big Five...