This chapter discusses the process of European institutional integration from a political-economy perspective, linking the long-standing political debate on the nature of the European project to the recent economic literature on political integration and disintegration. First, we introduce the...

We investigate the historical dynamics of the decline in fertility in Europe and its relation to measures of cultural and ancestral distance. We test the hypothesis that the decline of fertility was associated with the diffusion of social and behavioral changes from France, in contrast with the...

We provide evidence that deterioration of relations between the United States and another country, measured by divergence in their UN General Assembly voting patterns, reduces US imports from that country during the second wave of globalization. Though statistically, significant, such an effect...

We analyze a sample of 64 oil and gas companies of the nonrenewable energy sector from 26 countries using daily observations on return on stock from July 15, 2003 to August 14, 2012. A panel model with fixed effects and Tarch effects shows significant prices for specific risk factors including...

This paper examines the role of patent policy in a spatial model of sequential innovation. Initial entrepreneurs develop a new product market and anticipate that subsequent innovation may lead to a product line that consumers value more highly. The likelihood of sequential innovation increases...

For thousands of years, the Chinese and many other nations around the workd built defensive walls around their cities. This phenomenon is not well understood from an economic perspective. To rationalize the existence of city walls, we propose a simple model that relates the deimesions of city...

How does isolation affect the economic activity of cities? Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of inter-city transport costs in determining the income...

This paper presents the results from a field experiment which varies the amount of information seen by two million job seekers when viewing 100,000 job postings on a large online job posting website. The information seen is the true number of people who previously started an application. This...

We examine changes in the use of nontax revenues for education finance from 1991-2010. Beyond the summary of usage over time, we ask whether non- traditional revenues like fees accentuate or mitigate the impact of downturns. More generally, we examine the extent to which school districts have...

The paper addresses the issue of corruption, which appears to be endemic in Greece. It reviews the facts about corruption as multi-faceted phenomenon and its close relationship to tax evasion, by comparing Greece to its EU partners, as well internationally. It addresses corruption as an instance...