This paper analyzes whether the propensity to secede by subnational regions responds mostly to differences in income per capita or to distinct identities. We explore this question in a quantitative political economy model where people's willingness to finance a public good depends on their...

Governments in several countries have recently spent considerable effort to defend domestic firms against acquisition attempts from abroad and instead favoured mergers among national firms. In this paper we offer an explanation why globalization can reinforce the case for promoting national...

This paper seeks to reconcile two seemingly contradictory strands in the literature on economic development in the late nineteenth century Habsburg Empire - one emphasizing the centrifugal impact of rising intra-empire of nationalism, the other stressing significant improvements in market...

We analyze an oligopolistic market where a domestic and a foreign firm are engaged in a takeover battle for a domestic competitor. Any merger or acquisition (M&A) must be approved by a welfare maximizing domestic competition agency which may or may not be prone to economic patriotism. A...

Interpersonal relations are shaped by the judgements associated with the social categories that individuals perceive in their social contacts. I develop a model of how those judgments form based on a theory of symbolic values. The model depicts the interaction between two values, one associated...

The work deals with the ideological clashes in Russian economic thought after 1991. Based on Schumpeter's distinction between economic analysis and economic thought, the paper focuses on a principal conflict that divides a new generation of Westernminded scholars and traditional Russian...

The official view on ECB monetary policy claims that monetary decisions are based solely on average data for the euro zone and that diverging regional developments are disregarded. However, experience from other two tier central banks and theoretical considerations suggest that this official...

This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where growing conflict between various ethnic and national groups within an empire might have contributed to the emergence of internal borders and even its eventual dissolution. To this end we adopt an...

Interpersonal relations are shaped by the judgements associated with the social categories that individuals perceive in their social contacts. I develop a model of how those judgments form based on a theory of symbolic values. The model depicts the interaction between two values, one associated...

We analyze non-cooperative international climate policy in a setting of political competition by national interest groups. In the first stage, countries decide whether to set up an international emission permits market, which only forms if it is supported by all countries. In the second stage,...