The region of East Asia has experienced profound changes during the last two decades with the formation of a more region-oriented regional order in the economic and other arenas. Amidst the tendency moving fast towards an increased economic interdependence, there have been growing discussions...

After 20 years of its foundation, MERCOSUR has failed to meet its declared goals. Far from being a common market and not yet a customs union, it has neither deepened nor (legally) enlarged. All other regionalist projects in Latin America fare even worse, albeit they have arguably fostered...

Power indices are mappings that quantify the influence of the members of a voting body on collective decisions a priori. Their nonlinearity and discontinuity makes it difficult to compute inverse images, i.e., to determine a voting system which induces a power distribution as close as possible...

Isolated effects of labor and product market institutions as well as the interaction between both aforementioned categories on unemployment have been extensively discussed in the empirical literature. However, interaction effects between individual labor market institutions have been widely...

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to...

We study individuals who can choose how to compete with an opponent for one nonzero payoff. They can either nudge themselves into a fair set of rules where they have the same information and actions as their opponent, or into unfair rules where they spy, sabotage or fabricate their opponent's...

Raising the public administration's efficiency is, without any doubt, one of the greatest challenges nowadays in Brazil. The State's technical and allocative efficiency dimensions necessarily require efficiency of public agencies in the acquisition of inputs for their production and supply...

Recent adoption of competition laws across the globe has highlighted the importance of institutional considerations for antitrust effectiveness and the need for comparative institutional analyses of antitrust that extend beyond matters of substantive law. Contributing to the resulting nascent...

Motivations for introducing a statutory minimum wage in developing countries include reducing poverty, advancing social justice, and accelerating growth. Attaining these goals depends on the national context and policy choices. Institutional capacity tends to be limited, so institutional...