The increasing gap between the transition countries with regard to both their economic and political performance cannot be explained by their different starting conditions after the breakdown of the Soviet Union alone. Rather, it is due to cultural and historical circumstances that shape the...

The increasing gap between the transition countries with regard to both their economic and political performance cannot be explained by their different starting conditions after the breakdown of the Soviet Union alone. Rather, it is due to cultural and historical circumstances that shape the...

Disinflation can be implemented gradually or via Cold Turkey - an immediate change of policy - with the latter being mainly recommended by theory and empirical literature. But Cold Turkey may only be superior because it is endogenously selected for favorable environments. To eliminate this...

A major characteristic of the European Union is its transitional or evolving nature, in particular with regard to the assignment of powers between the two main levels of government. More precisely, under current constitutional arrangements, this evolving nature takes the form of an integration...

This paper concerns multistage games, with and without discounting, in which each player can increase the level of an action over time so as to increase the other players' future payoffs. An action profile is said to be achievable if it is the limit point of a subgame perfect equilibrium path....

December of 2008 marks the 30th year of the beginning of China's economic opening. The country's rapid development since 1978 is without historical precedent. Yet this growth is even more impressive when one surveys the entire period from the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 to present....

Im Dezember 2008 jährt sich der Beginn der wirtschaftlichen Öffnung Chinas zum dreißigsten Mal. Der Wachstumsspurt der Volksrepublik China seit 1978 übertrifft alles bisher Bekannte. Diese Dynamik ist umso beachtlicher, blickt man auf den gesamten Zeitraum seit der Gründung der...

Modifying the objective function of a discretionary central bank to include an interest-rate smoothing objective increases the welfare of an economy where large contractionary shocks occasionally force the central bank to lower the policy rate to its effective lower bound. The central bank with...

We analyze a repeated cheap-talk game in which the receiver is privately informed about the conflict of interest between herself and the sender and either the sender or the receiver controls the stakes involved in their relationship. We focus on payoff-dominant equilibria that satisfy a...