This paper analyzes the evolution of African American entrepreneurship by comparing the patterns of development of African American entrepreneurship and immigrant entrepreneurship. Whereas most literature focuses on African American culture as the reason for limited entrepreneurial success compared to certain immigrant groups, this paper examines how social, economic, and political forces have ...

Data from a unique monetary ‘experiment’ conducted in the UK during the period 1994-97 are used to investigate the cost of political intervention in monetary policy. The paper finds that the difference between government bond yields in Germany (but not the US) and the UK was systematically related to an index of the credibility of monetary policy constructed on the basis of the frequency of agr...

We develop a general theory for the emergence of minority governments in multiparty parliamentary systems using a bargaining model in the tradition of Baron and Ferejohn, 1989. We show that generically (i.e. except for a set of Lebesgue measure zero in the space of the model’s parameters) minority governments form with strictly positive probability when office utility from cabinet positions is ...

This study shows that order flow in a foreign exchange market only has permanent price impact if it comes from certain regions. These regions are – as predicted by the local information hypothesis – centers of political and financial decision making. It is revealing that orders from other regions only show a very short-lived but no permanent price impact. Local information is so important that ...

Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are advanced to bolster the claim that direct political participation via referenda and initiatives constitutes an advanced form of democracy with beneficial effects on Transition Countries. Direct democracy raises trust and honesty and improves social outcomes. Per capita incomes and subjective well-being are raised. Standard arguments against direc...

We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

Instability, proxied by individual level data on satisfaction, is measured, its association with inequality is investigated, and the socio-economic determinants of overall satisfaction are modelled. A very recent national representative household survey (2002) with a module designed to serve this purpose has been the statistics source of this study. The results point to the role of income growt...

Despite restrictive migration policies, large numbers of undocumented migrants reside in many destination countries. If official migration targets are not enforced, why are they devised? To address this puzzle, we develop a political agency model with uncertainty about the supply of migrants, where an elected official can either have preferences congruent with the majority of his electorate, or...

Recent studies have challenged the view that trade openness leads to more specialization in countries’ trade. Using a panel of 116 countries over 35 years, we show that openness can be positively associated with both specialization and diversification, depending on the measure used. Moreover, for developing countries in our sample, the effect of openness on trade structure depends on the type o...

Why Are European Countries Diverging in Their Unemployment Experience? During the nineties, unemployment has fallen in a number of European countries while it has remained high in others. The paper discusses potential causes for that evolution in light of recent economic research, emphasizing obstacles to reform due to political constraints, the prevalence of ideology, and agency issues within ...