Powerful states often accept unanimity voting on accession to international institutions, even though this enables weak states to blackmail powerful states into providing costly side payments. Whereas the literature attributes this choice mainly to efforts to bolster the legitimacy of...

This paper analyzes how opportunistic governments choose between alternative fiscal policies in order to increases their chances of re-election. To increase the provision of public goods shortly before elections – and thus, to generate a fiscal political business cycles – governments may...

This article analyzes the relationship between partisan heterogeneity and cooperation in international organizations. We argue that partisan heterogeneity increases distributional conflict among states during intergovernmental negotiations, thereby increasing the costs of cooperation. This...

Conflicts between European Union (EU) members about enlargement result from its redistributive effects. EU members are more likely to suffer from enlargement if they profit from EU transfers and if they are relatively close to applicant countries in which unemployment is significantly higher...

The introduction of the Euro has considerably affected the de facto monetary policy autonomy – defined as statistical independence from monetary policy in the key currency areas – in countries outside the European Currency Union. Using a standard open economy framework we argue that de facto...

One of the perennial questions in the scientific study of war is how war affects the economy. The authors examine the influence that the political developments within three war regions had on global financial markets (CAC, Dow Jones, FTSE) from 1990 to 2000. They embed a rational expectation...

We argue that the European currency union (ECU) reduced the de facto monetary policy autonomy of EU countries abstaining from introducing the euro. The large share of imports from euro zone countries renders a close alignment of monetary policy to the interest rate set by the European Central...