We demonstrate that the nationalities of EU Commissioners influence budget allocation decisions in favor of their country of origin. Our focus is on the Commissioners for Agriculture, who are exclusive responsible for a specific fund that accounts for the largest share of the overall EU budget....

How do economic shocks influence domestic politics? We take advantage of a surprise revaluation of the Swiss franc in early 2015 to identify the Polish citizens with clear and direct economic exposure: those repaying mortgages denominated in Swiss francs. Using original survey data collected...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

The innovation-model in the free/open source software (FOSS) domain differs fundamentally from the innovation-model in the proprietary software domain. Many FOSS advocates claim that opportunities for software patenting, which have recently been expanded in some countries and are used primarily...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) aims to enhance the efficiency of the Kyoto Protocol by providing greenhouse gas emission credits from projects in developing countries. Its unequal distribution among host countries gives rise to both concerns of equity and the question about the volume of...

Under the Kyoto Protocol, developing countries can voluntarily participate in climate change mitigation through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), where emission reduction credits from projects in developing countries are bought by industrialized countries to meet their own commitments....

An increasing proportion of greenhouse gas emissions is produced in urban areas in industrializing and developing countries. Recent research shows that per capita emissions in cities like Bangkok, Cape Town or Shanghai have already reached the level of cities like London, New York or Toronto....

Many European cities are faced with the task of transforming former industrial zones into new residential and commercial neighbourhoods. Such urban planning processes frequently include both public and private sector actors in decision making. Furthermore, they often give way to controversial...

Within less than three decades, climate change has developed from a rather obscure scientific topic into a key item on the global political agenda. It has also attracted strong attention in many areas of scientific research, including the social sciences. Social scientists, and notably...

Through the analysis of 25 OECD countries, this article seeks to investigate the assumption that political macro level variables such as welfare state systems and immigration-regimes shape the conditions encountered by young immigrants and thus impact on their school performance. The results...