As the independence of national central banks in the European Union is one of the main institutional features of the monetary constitution of the EU, the paper tries to find out whether central banks are factually independent in their decisions about interest rates if they face political...

This paper analyzes intergenerational redistribution in a 2-period overlapping-generations model of a representative democracy. The model incorporates redistribution between generations and redistribution within generations, allowing for heterogeneous labor productivities in the working...

How is economic policy made? In this paper we study a key determinant of the answer to the question: lobbying by fi…rms. Estimating a binary choice model of …firm behavior, we fi…nd signifi…cant evidence for the idea that barriers to entry induce persistence in lobbying. The existence of...

An adversarial game is used to model a firm's intrinsic and exerted influence over a regulator. Data from the World Business Environment Survey provide strong evidence in support of model hypotheses across a wide range of government agents, countries, and regulatory areas. Of particular...

It is often argued that countries with a high population share of children and young workers should attract large capital inflows from aging industrialized economies. However, many of these countries deter foreign investors by a high risk of creeping or outright expropriation. In this paper we...

A crisis is an unexpected event that creates uncertainty and poses a direct or perceived threat to the goals and norms of an organization or society. While crises are ubiquitous, how societies respond to crises, and the way crises affect societies, is largely a matter of constitutional political...

The upward trend in the incidence of caesarean deliveries is a widespread stylised fact in many countries. Several studies have argued that it does not reflect, at least in part, patients’ needs but that it is also influenced by other factors, such as providers/physicians incentives. Not...