Some committees convene behind closed doors while others publicly discuss issues and make their decisions. This paper studies the role of open and closed committee decision making in presence of external influence. We show that restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias...

Societies provide institutions that are costly to use, but able to enforce long-run relationships. We study the optimal decision problem of using self-governance for risk sharing or governance through enforcement provided by these institutions. Third-party enforcement is modelled as a costly...

The Civil Society Facility (CSF) was established in 2008 under the Instrument for Pre-accession, with the purpose of supporting the development of an active civil society capable of participating in public debate on democracy, human rights, social inclusion and the rule of law. The CSF aims to...

This working document provides a photography of the current state of affairs in EU lobbying, addressing questions such as the number of organisations involved, their main strategies and working methods; this description is based on an analysis of recent academic work on lobbying and special...

This paper provides an analytical description of the experiences made in the United States of America with the last two revisions of legislation controlling lobbyists and their activities, in particular the US Lobbying Disclosure Act. Conclusions with respect to the ongoing debate in the EU on...

This is a survey on the recent game theoretic literature on committee decision making. We consider theoretical work on the role of (i) strategic voting, (ii) costly information acquisition, (iii) conflicting interests, and (iv) communication in committees. Moreover, we review recent experimental...

This paper investigates the in inflationary effects of fscal policy in an optimizing general equilibrium monetary model with capital accumulation, exible prices and wealth effects. The model is calibrated to Euro Area quarterly data. Simulation results show that government defcits, high debt...

This paper examines the feasibility of implementing Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) Control in structural cointegrated VAR models and sheds some light on the two major problems generated by such implementation. The first aspect to be taken into account is the effect of the presence of unit roots...

A two-country sticky-price model is used to analyse the interactions between fiscal and monetary policy. The role of an u0091activistu0092 fiscal policy as a stabilisation tool is considered and a measure of the welfare gains from international fiscal policy cooperation is derived. It is found...