This paper explores a number of conceptual issues that are germane to the analysis of conflict and cooperation in international economic policy and law. The focus is on issues involving conflict and cooperation that have been treated in the theory of international trade, in particular departures...

The WTO inspired strengthening of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in developing countries remains highly controversial even 15 years after the 1994 TRIPs agreement. This paper employs both theory and empirics to assess how a strengthening of IPRs affects international technology diffusion by...

This paper related four topics:i) why is there such a strong movement to harmonize private, commercial law and in particular the law of secured transactions at this time, and what are some of the characteristics of hamonization efforts; ii) the body paper proposed revisions to UCC Article 8, the...

Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively meas-uring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper pre-sents more...

Judicial independence is not only a necessary condition for the impartiality of judges, it can also endanger it: judges that are independent could have incentives to remain uninformed, become lazy or even corrupt. It is therefore often argued that judicial independence and judicial...

Although twenty years have elapsed since the beginning of transition, Eastern European and Central Asian countries are still characterized by remarkably heterogeneous levels of economic development. In the light of the established causal relationship between finance and growth, we perform an...