The dissertation examines the development of the global direction of the EU Common commercial policy (CCP) in the period 2000-2009. The prerequisites for the global direction becoming a leading one are identified – economic globalization, accelerated development of the global trade, the new...

The article analyses the sectoral specialization of Bulgarian exports, making a comparison with the sectoral specialization of the EU as an entity and some of the new member states. It focuses on the question of whether Bulgaria's five years of EU membership contributed to the approximation of...

This paper provides an analysis of intra-regional disparities in Bulgaria during the EU post-accession period. Bulgaria joined the EU together with Romania on 1 January 2007. In accordance with the EU legislation, six NACE 2 planning regions have been established – three in the southern part...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

We develop a model to show that cartels that produce goods with lower durability are easier to sustain implicitly. This observation gen- erates the following results: 1) implicit cartels have an incentive to pro- duce goods with an inefficiently low level of durability; 2) a monopoly or explicit...

In this paper, a promotion tournament is considered, where, at the beginning of the tournament, it is unknown how long the tournament lasts. Further, the promotion decision is based on the assessments of a supervisor with imperfect recall. In line with psychological research, the supervisor is...

Policy makers often decide to liberalize foreign bank entry but at the same time restrict the mode of entry. We study how different entry modes affect the interest rate for loans in a model in which domestic banks possess private information about their incumbent clients but foreign banks have...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the...

In the 1990s, patenting schemes changed in many respects: upcoming new technologies accelerated the shift from price competition towards competition based on technical inventions, a worldwide surge in patenting took place, and the ‘patent thicket’ arose as a consequence of strategic...