We study how two selection systems for public officials, appointment and election, affect policy outcomes, focusing on state court judges and their criminal sentencing decisions. First, under appointment, policy congruence with voter preferences is attained through selecting judges with...

We investigate the influence of electoral rules and voter information in elections on voting outcomes and accountability of incumbent public officials, using new data on election of state court judges in 40 states in the U.S. from 1990 to 2010. We find, first, that voting is very partisan in...

Our findings are as follows. First, the sentencing behavior of elected judges is an important determinant of their reelection. Hence, elected judges face serious reelection incentives on their behavior, which appointed judges do not face. However, the extent and the direction of the effect are...

This paper studies time inconsistency, asymmetric information, and political ideology in natural monopoly regulation of electricity distribution companies. Empirically, more conservative political environments have higher regulated rates of return and worse operational efficiency as measured by...

This paper investigates the consequences of the completion of the internal market in the EC using a computable general equilibrium model of trade under imperfect competition. The focus of the paper is the welfare consequences of reducing trade barriers and the changes in production and trade...

The impact on the Southern Mediterranean Countries (SMC) of the current process of trade liberalization with the European Union is explored. The methodology is that of computable general equilibrium modelling under imperfect competition and the model includes ten countries and 11 sectors. This...

Preferential trading arrangements involving developing and developed countries are proliferating. These are both difficult to assess and call on scarce analytical and negotiating resources particularly but not only in developing countries. The Sussex Framework, developed with DFID support, is...

This paper explores export spillovers that arise from foreign direct investment generated linkages between domestic and foreign firms in Turkish manufacturing industry. By making use of a recent firm level dataset, we investigate how supplying to foreign affiliated firms, as proxied by their...

This paper contributes to the emprical debate on firm heterogeneity in international trade dealing with the direction of causality from which the performance premium across destination markets originates. For this purpose, we first investigate the selection of firms into markets with asymmetric...