Strengthening budgetary surveillance and coordination of budgetary policy measures in the EU is of vital importance for economic stability and growth. The decentralised decision making structure in most areas of budgetary policies, requires the need to balance national and common objectives;...

Taking into account the potentially different starting and framework conditions of cities in different regions of the European Union, we present a new approach for sustainability transition analysis with a special focus on the governance of urban common-pool resources. The aim is to identify the...

Long-term beneficial welfare state reforms not only face opposition from powerful insiders and beneficiaries of the system in place. While potential losers from a policy change are often relatively easy to spot, ewll-designed reforms generate mostly diffuse gains, and the potential winners are...

Gender equity in the creation and enforcement of social norms is important not only as a normative principle but it can also support long term economic growth. Yet in most societies, coercive power is in the hands of men. We investigate whether this form of segregation is due to inherent gender...

A large body of recent quantitative work on the 'diversity detriment' hypothesis finds that ethno-religious diversity is linked with a host of societal ills, implying in turn a strong challenge to multiculturalist theory and policies. Given the stakes, the appropriate conceptualization and...

We examine a model in which two politicians compete for office and for wages. Their remunerations are either set by the public or are offered competitively by the candidates during campaigns. Our main finding shows that competitive wage offers by candidates lead to lower social welfare than...

Much recent research in economics focuses on exploring behavioral anomalies, i.e., systematic deviations from the assumptions of the rationally self-interested model of man. Laboratory studies are used to identify seeming inconsistencies with micro-economic theory on the level of individuals....

In this paper I develop a simple dynamic agency model postulating that, among budgetary institutions, transparency of the budgeting process is the main driving force in explaining differences in fiscal outcomes and that budgetary numeric rules can be an active long-run constraint only if the...

La toma de decisiones es, por su impacto económico, social, motivacional y hasta simbólico, una actividad administrativa de extraordinaria importancia. Esta importancia es muy clara cuando tratamos con decisiones estratégicas, como la inversión en una nueva planta o la expansión de la...

This paper studies the strategic foundations of the Representative Voter Theorem (Rothstein, 1991), also called the second version of the Median Voter Theorem. As a by-product, it also considers the existence of non-trivial strategy-proof social choice functions over the domain of...