Each new crisis comes with financial innovations being pointed as scapegoats. But innovations are in general new tools materialising around existing strategies to make them more available and measurable. Their pace of evolution paired with that of the complexity of the interconnectedness between...

In the North of Europe, club membership is higher than in the South, but the frequency of contacts with friends, relatives and neighbors is lower. We link this fact to another one: the low geographical mobility rates in the South of Europe relative to the North.To interpret these facts, we build...

We present a model of electoral competition in which parties act as brands and use competition to select their candidates. We show that the forces that shape the competition between party representatives and independents rationalize the positive correlation between inequality and polarization...

This article explains Europarties' inability to act and position themselves cohesively in EU politics. It develops a theoretical framework based mainly on domestic parties' disincentives to agree on a common Europarty position. The framework is applied to the case of social democracy and fiscal...

This article analyses the parliamentary debates and decision-making related to the highly contentious EU directive on services. It is intended as a contribution to the academic debate on political conflict lines in the European Parliament. Our argument is that neither the left-right cleavage nor...

It is often alleged that PTAs involving the EC and the US include a significant number of obligations in areas not currently covered by the WTO Agreement, such as investment protection, competition policy, labour standards and environmental protection. The primary purpose of this study is to...