Within the context of the continuing integration process in Europe, this paper addresses the question of whether policies in the EU should head towards autonomy, coordination or harmonization. Taking the path dependence effect into account, it is the authors’ opinion that Europe has gone too...

We investigate the financial impact of social trust, institutional quality, and regulations. As a testing ground we employ a unique, large, and hand-crafted dataset of more than 850 000 lending-based crowdfunding projects from 155 platforms across 55 countries during 2005-2018. We show that the...

The discussion of the growth consequences of socialism has fulminated for a century, sparked off by the Calculation Debate in the 1920s and 30s, and has concerned the performance of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and the mixed development in the 1990s after communism collapsed in Central and...