The vast majority of federations lack exit clauses. Existing theoretical explanations of this stylized fact focus on issues of credible commitment, signaling, and the risk of strategic exploitation. However, such accounts are unable to explain the adoption by the European Union (EU) of Article...

This article describes a heuristic for scheduling so-called ‘modular' projects. Exact solutions to this NP-hard problem can be obtained with existing branch-and-bound and dynamic-programming algorithms, but only for small to medium-size instances. The proposed heuristic, by contrast, can be...

This article presents a political economic analysis of exit from federations. Over time, members' benefits from being in a federation can fluctuate because of changes in the state of the world. If a member stops benefitting, it may wish to secede i.e. exit the federation. Based on a real options...

1. The State Monopoly on Violence -- 2. Market Failures and Institutions -- 3. Innovation and the Capitalist Revolution -- 4. Monopoly Power and Competition -- 5. Who Pays for Fixed Costs? -- 6. Insurance versus Incentives -- 7. Reputations and Implicit Contracts -- 8. Adverse Selection -- 9....