This paper aims at showing the role of agriculture in determining many of the controversies and problems of the current phase of globalisation. This first entails presenting key statistics indicating the main developments in world agricultural trade, illustrating how there has been a relative...

The traditional measure of market power is the HHI, which gives implausible results given the low elasticity of demand in electricity spot markets, unless it is adapted to take account of contracting. In its place the Residual Supply Index has been proposed as a more suitable index to measure...

Money has always been a difficult and complex concept and the views about what money actually is could hardly be more diverse. This is all the more true in the times of completely manipulated irredeemable paper currencies, the functioning of which is based almost completely on the extent to...

Is the politicisation of monetary policy in a currency union desirable? This paper shows that in a setting where political influence by national governments is modeled as a common agency game with rational expectations, the answer to this question crucially depends on whether the common central...

The paper compares the extent of intergenerational earnings and educational correlation in Japan and France. It uses very similar repeated surveys that provide information on educational attainment and family background, conducted in Japan and France. To insure comparability, similar sample...

One of the fastest-developing areas of political science studies the relationship between the different branches of government. Within that literature, the most popular research questions concern the delegation of powers by one branch to another, the resulting levels of discretion of the...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between long-run economic growth and output volatility. There is an emerging theoretical literature on the topic which is inconclusive on the size and direction of the relationship. We analyze this relationship empirically for the time series...

Economic theories are increasingly popular in political science, and in particular in research on the relations between the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches of government. Among these theories, principal-agent (´PA´) and transaction cost economics (´TCE´) feature...

The absence of one broadly accepted design template for liberalised electricity markets induces regulatory competition and institutional diversity. Focussing on continental Europe and the USA, this analysis explores how agents and structures accelerate or impede the move to one standard market...

The aim of the present paper is to assess the degree of central bank legal independence enjoyed by the central banks of the south shore of the Mediterranean Sea, which belong to the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and to shed some light on the macroeconomic outcomes of different degrees of...