The Theory of the Second Best implies that any country with less-than-ideal resources can lose from international trade. Recently it has been suggested this means the South (poor countries) are better off suppressing trade with the North, especially trade in natural resource products, since the...

According to the explanatory memorandum, by adopting a new Civil Code the intention was to introduce the regulatory monistic conception of the relations in private law in one code. Therefore the legislator declares that it incorporated "all" regulations regarding persons, family relations and...

We model EU countries? bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. We find that country-specific factors (in the form of heterogeneous intercepts) are a crucial determinant of ratings. Whilst ?new? EU countries typically have lower ratings than...