Also published in "Regulation of Financial Institutions Journal CMBO" (December 2009). From the responses received from the European Commission’s consultation on control structures in audit firms and their consequences on the audit market, a consultation which was launched in November 2008,...

External auditors for NHS trusts give an independent opinion on the trust'sfinancial statements. They also review aspects of the arrangements that trusts have put inplace to ensure the proper conduct of their financial affairs, and to manage their performanceand use of resources. Special...

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption...

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians´ outside earnings. We propose a simple theoretical model with politicians facing a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The model has a testable...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...

This paper studies the location decisions of political parties. We propose a game where agents vote according to ideology and valence, and media create candidates' charisma. The results we obtain show that candidates realize the power of media and therefore locate themselves at some point...

Population structure in current Korea is characterized as "aging society". Under this aging society, the prompt and large-scale expansion of welfare for the elderly is required to meet the welfare demand. To figure out the factors influencing welfare spending, we test how the mobilization power...

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect...