The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful codecision makers , understanding of the final stage of the procedure...

This report contains three separate papers, each addressing selected issues concerning natural gas policy and security of gas supply in Europe. The over-arching themes are vulnerability (to supply disruptions, to supplier pricing power) and fragmentation; and measures designed to overcome them,...

Power indices suggest that adding new members to a voting body may increase the power of an existing member, even if the number of votes of all existing members and the decision rule remain constant. This phenomenon is known as the paradox of new members. This paper uses the leading model of...

Power indices suggest that adding new members to a voting body may increase the power of an existing member, even if the number of votes of all existing members and the decision rule remain constant. This phenomenon is known as the paradox of new members. This paper shows that the paradox has...

We use a unique dataset to analyze the marriage patterns of the British and German nobility from the 1500s to the 1800s, and discuss the differences in institutions between the two countries. Historical evidence shows that: nobles tended to marry nobles with identical title; and, German marriages...

This paper derives conditions under which preferences and technology are nonparametrically identified in hedonic equilibrium models, where products are differentiated along more than one dimension and agents are characterized by several dimensions of unobserved heterogeneity. With products...

The United Kingdom will leave the European Union. Brexit will involve many complex negotiations. This paper analyses the negotiation position of the parties (UK, EU, Member States) based on a set of four key negotiation factors: agreement options, non-agreement alternatives, interests, and...

In this paper the author analyzes the nature of the legislative process which takes place within the European Parliament by studying the bilateral interactions among its relevant decisional groups, i.e. the parliamentary groups. In this sense, the author uses a methodological approach inspired...

We examine the relationship between parliamentary seats and cabinet posts in European governments between 1946 and 2001. Our specification improves on past studies in two respects. First, it derives and uses the voting weights of the underlying coalition formation games. This reduces the...