In the past year, local governments have made a foray into the hotly debated arena of immigration law and policy by adopting laws to address illegal immigration in their respective jurisdictions. Courts have struck down many of these laws on the grounds that they are preempted pursuant to a...

The Internet has completely changed the landscape of the planet. As a result, many areas of the law are being re-thought or re-developed, while other new issues emerge that defy all remotely related regulations. Online gambling is one of those areas in which the laws have lagged behind the...

In the EU circuit (especially the European Parliament, the Council and Coreper) as well as in national parliaments of the EU Member States, one observes a powerful tendency to regard 'subsidiarity' as a 'political' issue. Moreover, subsidiarity is frequently seen as a one-way street : powers...

This article presents the evolution of the National Bank of Romania from the status of a central government body to the one of autonomous public institution, through laws that have governed it from its setting up (1880) to the present. As an autonomous administrative authority, central bank...

Contemporary economic liberalism comes in two forms: a substantive version, which defines the scope and extent of economic policy, and a procedural version, which draws on citizens' preferences. Whereas the recent reconception of economic liberalism based on social-contract theory considers the...

In the history of economic thought Walter Eucken is mostly known for his impact in establishing the Social Market Economy in post-war Germany. Even though there is a growing interest in his ideas especially from an Austrian and a Constitutional Economics perspective, his influence on the...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the contribution of trade liberalisation to differences in the level of prosperity across nations. We compare this with the relative contribution of institutional capacity to prosperity, as well as the role of human capital accumulation in that...

Regarding the trade-off between the depth and the duration of recessions, there exists a mounting empirical evidence of the idiosyncratic and non-synchronized behavior of the business cycle over time within and across countries. In this paper, I propose a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium...

The Group of Twenty and the new world order it is meant to signify have prompted a wave of triumphalism around the world from those who, like French President Nicolas Sarkozy, bemoan the influences of quot;Anglo-Saxon capitalismquot; and from neo-Marxists, who view the economic crisis as a...