This paper shows that the abolition of state guarantees to publicly owned banks in Germany resulted in an increase in refinancing costs at German savings banks. Rather than being the result of increased market discipline, the increase in refinancing costs is shown to be driven by spillover...

Public sector unions around the world are under threat from political forces. Combined, the financial crisis and austerity measures have challenged public sector unions’ legitimacy. In the U.S., the postrecession assault on public sector unions is rooted in political ideology, with not only a...

Hierarchical firms are enterprises with rigid internal job ladders. We examine the state enterprise as the prototypical hierarchical firm. In the state enterprise, promotion of employees through the internal hierarchy is determined by the workers’ allocation of time between rent seeking and...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a scientific and methodical approach for determination of the comprehensive social responsibility indicator in this paper based on estimation of influence degree for the economical, ecological, social and labour, standard and legal components. There is...

The State Action Doctrine exempts anti-competitive conduct from the United States antitrust laws, under certain conditions. This paper discusses the exemption, particularly its limits, from the perspective of its historical and Constitutional background. It demonstrates that this doctrine does...

Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) have become a popular alternative to traditional regulation. However, little is known about whether these programs are sending accurate signals about the environmental practices of their participants. As a means for understanding signaling accuracy, this...

Although most U.S. institutions of higher education now make appreciable use of work-based learning options, their attention to experiential education as a learning vehicle is relatively limited. The connection between the work experience and the on-campus curriculum is only loosely formed, and...

Banks play a special role as providers of informative signals about the quality and value of their borrowers. Such signals, however, may have a quality of their own as the banks’ selection and monitoring abilities may differ. Using an event study methodology, we study the importance of the...

According to reputational models of political economy, a term limit may change the behavior of a chief executive because he does not have to stand for election. We test this hypothesis in a sample of 52 countries over the period 1977-2000, using government spending, social and welfare spending...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...