It is our natural inclination to find stable patterns and meaning in the chaotic world around us. This assists in our efforts to understand the past and forecast the future. The starting point of this essay is the phrase "dismal science" which is an often used 'epitheton ornans' of economics....

The aim of this research was to identify determinants of the employment protection legislation reforms in the global perspective. The study was based on the Labor Freedom index published by the Heritage Foundation, which allowed to include 179 countries in the research that were observed in the...

Roughly during the last decade, European Competition Policy has undergone a series of fundamental changes. All four areas - cartel policy, merger policy, abuse control, and state aid control - have been subject to a modernization process, which led to a focus on analysing the effects of...

Previous studies found the introduction of the today well established media radio and television to affect political participation. This paper evaluates the effect of the relatively recent introduction of a new medium, broadband internet. OLS resultssuggest a positive association between DSL...

The paper develops a composite index of GMO standards restrictiveness for 60 countries, assigning objective scores to six different regulatory dimensions. Using this index and its components, we empirically investigate the political and economic detfirminants of GMO regulations. Results show...

This paper provides evidence on private standards on genetically modified (GM) organisms for 44 retailers operating in 54 countries, distinguishing between retailers not using GM ingredients, and retailers using ingredients which are potentially GM in private label products. Using this...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

This paper argues that the key issue for defining and solving the Eurozone's (EZ) difficulties lies in readjusting the relationship between the centre and the periphery of the EZ. Our argument proceeds in two steps. Firstly, the basic finance problem of a centre-periphery system is captured by a...

We identify exogenous variation in incumbent policymakers' re-election probabilities and explore empirically how this variation affects the incumbents' investment in physical capital. Our results indicate that a higher re-election probability leads to higher investments, particularly in the...

Public auditors should reduce agency problems and improve transparency. We address the question of whether auditors should be elected by the citizens or appointed by either the legislature or the executive, and explore the influence of conducting performance audits. We construct a unique dataset...