transaction cost economics (williamson, 1985) is a theory of the firm in new institutional economics that has been applied for analysing economic transaction; especially, make-or-buy decisions or vertical mergers in firms. the contribution of this paper is applying this theory for a political issue that is party formation. transaction cost economics links the party formation to the transaction ...

In this paper there is a investigation of Ukraine’s contradictory attitude to reform. This attitude has seen the country characterised by hesitancy on reforms which has stifled its economic performance in areas such as privatisation and competition policy. Most notably the presence of interest and lobby groups, conflict between political institutions, and contradictory conceptions of economic r...

Fiscal Union Consensus Design under the Risk of Autarky* Inspired by the current debate over the future of the monetary union in Europe, this paper provides a simple model for the determination of the conditions of survival of the common good, which requires the creation of an effective fiscal union. We highlight the importance of institutional design and varying decision weights for the enlarg...

This paper identifies conditions under which voters are better off not knowing the policy choices of incumbents: we show that government transparency can actually lower voter welfare. To do so, we analyze a model of political agency where voters face two forms of uncertainty: uncertainty about the incumbent’s policy preferences and uncertainty about the relationship between policies and outcome...

Model uncertainty hampers consensus on the key determinants of economic growth. Some recent cross-country cross-sectional analyses have employed Bayesian Model Averaging to tackle the issue of model uncertainty. This paper extends that approach to panel data models with countryspecific fixed effects in order to simultaneously address model uncertainty and endogeneity issues. The empirical findi...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are much smaller than differences with respect to inequality perceptions or redistributive preferences. ...

Since Adam Smith, most economists have held that a professional army is superior to a conscript army, thanks to benefiting from comparative advantage and specialization. We summarize recent literature on the benefits and costs of military draft, with a special emphasis on its dynamic effects on human capital formation. Empirical evidence refutes the claim that the economic costs of the draft wo...

UNLABELLED The objective of this paper is to verify the hypotheses presented in the literature on the causal relationship between inflation and its uncertainty, for the newest EU countries. To ensure the robustness of the results, in the study four models for inflation uncertainty are estimated in parallel: ARCH (1), GARCH (1,1), EGARCH (1,1,1) and PARCH (1,1,1). The Granger method is used to t...

We model core demands for better governance (political, economic and institutional), more employment and less consumer price inflation using a methodological innovation on the complete elimination of cross-country differences in signals susceptible of sparking social revolts. The empirical evidence based on 14 MENA countries show that the Arab Spring was predictable in 2007 to occur between Jan...

This paper explores the potential of microfinance in post-conflict economies, and specifically examines policy considerations for the case of Iraq. It presents important conditions of the post-conflict economy, and examines three critical requirements for successful microfinance operations, as outlined by the Microenterprises Best Practices Project. Political stability, economic demand and popu...