Abstract Bela Balassa's Theory of Economic Integration, published fifty years ago, is a
remarkable, yet little known book. This essay reviews developments in the economic …

This paper surveys and evaluates alternative views regarding the desirable combination of
accountability, credibility and transparency in the newly created ECB, including recent …

This paper estimates the welfare effects of Brexit in the medium to long run, focusing on
trade and fiscal transfers. We use a standard quantitative general equilibrium trade model …

Can external threats strengthen group identity? A growing body of research in economics
emphasises the importance of cultural attributes such as identity for trust and cooperation …

We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization for about 190
countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the …

In a world of trade restrictions, large countries enjoy economic benefits, because political
boundaries determine the size of the market. Under free trade and global markets even …

We study the effects of electoral institutions on the size and composition of public
expenditure in OECD and Latin American countries. We emphasize the distinction between …

This paper tests several leading hypotheses on determinants of government expenditure.
The purpose is to avoid omitted variables bias by testing the prominent theories in a …

Normally, economists take the size of countries as an exogenous variable. Nevertheless, the
borders of countries and their size change, partially in response to economic factors such as …

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the attribution of policy prerogatives to European Union
level institutions and compare them to the implications of normative policy models and to the …