This paper analyses the voting and abstention patterns in French departments in the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht treaty, in light of the potential impact of monetary union. We observe that departmental characteristics implying either greater benefits or lower costs from monetary union are...

Using a sample of 96 countries over the nineties, this paper examines the extent to which different dimensions of governance affect FDI inflows. It considers six aspects of governance. The results of a least-squares estimation suggest a positive relationship between institutional quality and...

This paper relates the volatility of interest rates to the collective nature of monetary policymaking in monetary unions. Several decision rules are modelled, including hegemonic and democratic procedures, and also committees headed by a chairman. A ranking of decision rules in terms of the...

Using a panel of countries over 1920-2000, this paper examines the extent to which different dimensions of the institutional framework affect exports of total, manufactured, and non-manufactured goods. It is observed that exports of manufactured goods are positively affected by the control of...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

This paper studies labor market discriminations as an agency problem. It sets up a principal-agent model of a firm, where the manager is a taste discriminator and has to make unobservable hiring decisions that determine the shareholder’s profits because workers differ in skills. The paper...

This paper studies monetary policy in the presence of asymmetric wage indexation. It is found that monetary authorities do not react to small output shocks and that their reaction to large shocks is asymmetric, insofar as they absorb positive shocks more than negative ones. As a consequence,...

This paper investigates the motive of geographic risk diversification in the lending activity for bank mergers in the EU on a sample of large banking groups. Geographic diversification should allow banks to reduce their risk. We observe that the loan portfolios of European banks are home-biased....

We analyze how adding the shadow economy to official output figures affects estimated technical efficiency at the country level. We find that this only slightly affects the ranking of efficiency scores, but increases average efficiency in a sample of 87 to 97 countries, both developed and...

This note studies the volatility of the policy chosen by a committee whose members’ preferences are volatile, due to common and individual preferences shocks. It is shown that majority voting mitigates the latter but not the former. The volatility of the policy is smaller the smaller the...