This contribution examines the international legal relevance of the recent Crimean referendum, starting from the premise that, as a matter of international customary law, and as a matter of legal consistency and fairness, a free territorial referendum is emerging as a procedural conditio sine...

In this paper we abstract from the usual gains and costs of decentralization (e.g. preference matching, spillovers and economies of scale). Instead we compare the political accountability of decentralized governments relative to centralized ones when there is a risk of bad governance. We study...

In this paper, I take a reduced form approach to test whether the limiting institutions of central bank independence and fixed exchange rates affect electoral and more broadly political instability. This provides insight into choice among social welfare, political business cycle, and economic...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic literature. While much is known about 19th century black legal and material conditions, less is known about how 19th century biological conditions were related to the physical environment and...