Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is...

"Race-to-the-bottom" deregulation is to be expected when markets operate across the borders of countries that independently choose and enforce labor policies. Less obviously, in pre-crisis EMU reforms of labor market policies were uneven and related to international imbalances. That pattern is...

In recent decades, governments around the world have increasingly used various forms of state aid to try to attract and retain the business activity of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Yet, in most cases, this "commercialisation of state sovereignty" (Palan, 2002) has failed to catalyse...