Traditionally, social scientists perceived causality as regularity. As a consequence, qualitative comparative case study research was regarded as unsuitable for drawing causal inferences since a few cases cannot establish regularity. The dominant perception of causality has changed, however....

The introduction of the Euro has considerably affected the de facto monetary policy autonomy - defined as statistical independence from monetary policy in the key currency areas - in countries outside the European Currency Union. Using a standard open economy framework we argue that de facto...

The estimation of slowly and rarely changing variables in panel data with unobserved unit effects suffers from inefficiency of the fixed effects estimator. Point estimates lack reliability when the within variance (the variation across time) remains small. The estimate's efficiency can be...

This paper analyzes fiscal competition under budget rigidities and tax equity (fairness norms). We outline a numerically solvable political economic model that treats the outcome of tax competition as one argument in the governments utility function, the others being public expenditure and tax...

This paper analyzes the estimation of time-invariant variables in panel data models with unit-effects. We compare three procedures that have frequently been employed in comparative politics, namely pooled-OLS, random effects and the Hausman-Taylor model, to a vector decomposition procedure that...

This paper perceives the politics of EU eastern enlargement to be a twofold process, in which governments of transition countries decide whether or not to apply for membership and in turn EU members decide whether or not to accept these applicants. Specifically, we argue that the level of...

Argument: The paper argues that the introduction of the Euro has considerably reduced de facto monetary policy autonomy in non-ECU members. We start from a simple Mundellian model, in which currency unions raise economic efficiency but reduce monetary policy autonomy. Our main argument holds...

This paper suggests a three-stage procedure for the estimation of time-invariant and rarely changing variables in panel data models with unit effects. The first stage of the proposed estimator runs a fixed-effects model to obtain the unit effects, the second stage breaks down the unit effects...