The desire to reform the European Commission is a recurrent theme on the agenda. Has the political failure to reach an appropriate restructuring of this institution a parallel in academic neglect of that institution? To answer this question the article looks into current research efforts on the...

With regulation seeking to foster competition at the same time as also having to protect essential services, the authors investigate regulatory styles, costs of new regulatory functions and how firms in the new regulatory landscape access and influence regulatory authorities. The authors...

The paper explores the preferences of subnational administrative elites with respect to crucial issues of European and subnational governance. The individual preferences of top subnational officials from five European countries are ascertained, patterns are identified and the data are...

Over the past 50 years, an increasing amount of political authority has been delegated to the regional government level in Europe. This paper analyses regional demands for involvement in policy-making by focusing on the preferences of top-level regional civil servants (“regio-crats”). A...

When the policy rate is constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB), a new set of tools is needed to answer crucial questions about monetary policy, regarding the impact of the ZLB, expected lift-off, and the appropriateness of the policy stance. We document the shortcomings of affine dynamic term...

In the past, government agencies with environmental missions rarely allowed public oversight over final decisions. However, faced with loss of control as policy and planning are increasingly carried out by Congress or the courts, some agencies, supported by businesses, communities, and...

To understand the effects of news on bond markets, it is instructive to look beyond individual maturities and consider the entire term structure of interest rates. For example, unexpected changes in monthly nonfarm payroll employment numbers cause large movements at short and medium maturities,...

Federal Reserve announcements of future purchases of longer-term bonds may affect asset prices by changing market expectations of the future supply of targeted securities. Such announcements may also affect asset prices by signaling that the stance of conventional monetary policy is likely to...