In a recent decision, the European Court of Justice has ruled that insurers cannot discriminate on grounds of sex in setting premiums or determining benefits. This paper discusses the background to this decision. It asks whether we are seeing a US-style ‘rights revolution’, fuelled by...

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era,...

""

First Annual Ralf Dahrendorf Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, 7 October 2010

The Eurozone’s reaction to the economic crisis beginning in late 2008 involved both efforts to mitigate the arbitrarily destructive effects of markets and vigorous pursuit of policies aimed at austerity and deflation. To explain this paradoxical outcome, this paper builds on Karl Polanyi’s...

"In the aftermath of the financial crisis, governments in the western world resumed policyinstruments from the immediate post-war period´s mixed economies. These instruments hadall been abandoned in the liberalizing market economies of the last decades. How do weinterpret these developments in...

"This paper investigates the geography of multinational corporations’ investments in the EU regions. The ‘traditional’ sources of location advantages (i.e. agglomeration economies, market access and labour market conditions) are considered together with innovation and socio-institutional...

This article analyses the recourse to religion as a source of law in the legal and political order of the European Union. It demonstrates that the legitimacy of religious input into law is recognised institutionally, symbolically and substantively. However, religious influence within the...

Andy Rose (2000), followed by many others, has used the gravity model of bilateral trade on a large data set to estimate the trade effects of monetary unions among small countries. The finding has been large estimates: Trade among members seems to double or triple, that is, to increase by...

The question of the European cultural heritage and the wider historical legacy of Europe has been the subject of much discussion in recent years as is reflected in new approaches to memory and commemoration, values, and European identity. Unlike earlier histories, which generally contained a...