This paper investigates the behavior of rent-seeking politicians in an environment of increasing economic integration. The focus of the paper is on the implications of globalization-induced political yardstick competition for constitutional design with a view to the current discussion in the...

Risks that are associated with an uncertain trading world have been dealt with using two different techniques in the literature: defensive, or insurance approaches, and preventive, or self-protection approaches. Much of the earlier work was emphasized by security issues but with the end of the...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady flow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady .ow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...

This paper estimates the effects of the EU enlargements in the 2000s for trade in parts and components and trade in final goods separately. A gravity model is applied to disaggregated trade data over the period 1999 - 2009 for trade between EU and OECD countries. The estimation approach accounts...

We analyze whether social distress from income comparisons affects attitudes towards the integration of economies. Using Germany’s division as natural experiment, we find that East Germans’ feelings of relative deprivation with respect to better-off West Germans led to significantly more...

This paper shows that a regional bias resulting from trade integration alters the transmission of a countryś monetary policy by shifting the burden of the exchange rate adjustment towards the less integrated trading partners. I first develop a simple model which illustrates how a concentration...