In this paper, I examine how the specific nature of economic integration in the European Union has affected member states’ redistribution policies over the last two decades. More precisely, I attempt to detail the effect of social-tax competition between member states within social mod-els,...

The European Constitutional Treaty (ECT) was presented by its drafters as an explicit constitution for the European Union (EU 25). We argue that considered as the European economic constitution its provisions do not sufficiently allow for the possibility of cooperative collective decision...

The ECB has a very clear idea of what European governments should do in the name of ‘sound’ economic management: balance the budget, reduce the role of the state in the economy by cutting public expenditures; increase the flexibility of labour markets by shrinking the welfare state (see for...

We provide several characterizations of unanimity decision rules, in a public choice model where preferences are constrained by attributes possessed by the alternatives (Nehring and Puppe, 2007a,b). Solidarity conditions require that when some parameters of the economy change, the agents whose...

Employment protection (EPL) has a well known negative impact on labor flows as well as an ambiguous but often negative effect on employment. In contrast, its impact on capital accumulation and capital-labor ratio is less well understood. The available empirical evidence suggests a non-monotonic...