This article looks at the political economy of structural reforms and growth in the European Union. As the EU's; economy approaches the world technology frontier, structural reforms that increase competition in intermediate goods sectors are necessary to boost innovation and productivity growth:...

Models of international unions suggest that large and rich countries reap little economic benefits from political integration with smaller and poorer countries. This paper challenges this view by presenting a formal study of economic influence by special interest groups in an international...

We construct a model where firms compete in both political and economic markets. In political markets, firms compete for influence over government transfer policy (rents). This activity can be beneficial for the firm, but is purely wasteful from the point of view of society because resources are...

This paper presents a positive theory of centralization of political decisions in an international union. My central claim is that lobbies play a role in determining the assignment of competencies to the union because their power of influence can increase or decrease under centralization. I show...

Is the politicisation of monetary policy in a currency union desirable? This paper shows that in a setting where political influence by national governments is modeled as a common agency game with rational expectations, the answer to this question crucially depends on whether the common central...

This paper surveys the recent political economy literature on countries' incentives to form international unions and/or to disintegrate in smaller jurisdictions. The main factors that affect these incentives are (i) economic integration, (ii) the international order, (iii) international...

This paper studies the political economy of growth in an economic union such as the EU. In the spirit of Acemoglu, Aghion and Zilibotti [Acemoglu, D., Aghion, P. and Zilibotti, F., 2006a, Distance to frontier, selection and economic growth, Journal of the European Economic Association, 4:1, 37-74;...

This paper looks at the political economy of merger policy under autarky and in international markets. We assume that merger policy is decided by antitrust authorities (whose objective is to maximize welfare) but can be influenced by governments, which are subject to lobbying by the firms (be...

We propose a theoretical framework for analyzing the problems associated to unilateral immigration policy in receiving countries and for evaluating the grounds for reform of international institutions governing immigration. We build a model with multiple destination countries and show that...