Before joining the European Union countries from Central and Eastern Europe have to adopt the acquis communautaire, i.e. the system of legal rules developed in the Union. The paper outlines an economic theory of optimum legal areas, that is used to determine the optimal size of the Union as well...

The conventional theory of international trade is dominated by a model presupposing a legal order that is perfect in its specifications and controllability, binding for all economic agents, no matter their nationality. World order appears to be cosmopolitan in the sense of Kant. An international...

It is the purpose of the paper to shed light on the question to what extent there is a need for a unified contract law in the European Union. The paper outlines a concept of constitutional uncertainty in international trade and presents a model of international transactions in the presence of a...

Drawing on a new analytical framework provided by the economic theory of optimal legal areas, this paper identifies the factors determining the optimal size of the European Union. It applies this theory to the question of how enlargement affects the welfare of the current and the new members of...

The paper applies standard public choice reasoning to the negotiations on EU enlargement and the Treaty of Nice. The starting point is the assumption that accession can only be successfully completed if the interests of decisive actors in present EU countries are respected. Decisive actors in...

Based on a broad set of regional aggregated and disaggregated consumer price index (CPI) data from major industrialized countries in Asia, North America and Europe we are examining the role that national borders play for goods market integration. In line with the existing literature we find that...

Recent research suggests that adopting a common currency increases bilateral trade. In this paper, I explore experiences of currency union entry in the post-war period and find no effect on trade. Previous results derived from a large panel data set (covering more than 200 countries from 1948...

The European competition policy can look back at a successful forty-year old practice of application by the European Commission. However, non-competition factors in the competition policy has become more and more relevant with the increasing importance of the so called positive integration. In a...

An increasingly important part of contemporary merger control both in the US and the EU is unilateral effects analysis, particularly with regard to oligopolistic mergers. In practice, this requires econometric analyses of past market data and, above all, the construction of simulation models in...

This paper develops a proposal for an international multilevel competition policy system, which draws on the insights of the analysis of multilevel systems of institutions. In doing so, it targets to contribute to bridge a gap in the current world economic order, i.e. the supranational...