In this paper we build on the analysis of La Porta et al. [La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F., Shleifer, A., & Vishny, R. W. (1998). Law and finance. Journal of Political Economy, 106(6), 1113-1155], to investigate the importance of legal families in explaining the dissimilar levels of...

Recent success of the flat income tax in Eastern Europe raises questions about whether there is scope for such a policy reform in Western Europe as well. We address this by estimating the potential distributional impact of various flat taxes for selected Western European countries. Our...

Globalization has brought about fundamental change. But, the same theory that shows that free trade is beneficial also shows that globalization can be harmful to at least one of the trading countries. Moreover, with globalization, the interests of a country and its companies may diverge. In this...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse Okun's law for the Spanish regions over the period 1980-2004. Based on its "gap" specification, the results show that an inverse relationship between unemployment and output holds for most of the regions and for the whole country. However, the quantitative...