Mancur Olson's theory of the decline of nations is path-breaking in political economics. It has been tested cross-sectionally in numerous empirical studies. We survey the existing results briefly, with a special focus on studies using the number of lobbies as an exogenous variable. Using data...

Certainly the current crisis is affecting seriously the convergence process in EU. Starting from the spatial distribution in EU of some fundamental development indicators before the current crisis, we try to estimate the impact of the prolonged crisis. During last years, the less developed...

Discounting has to take account of ecosystem services in consumption and production. Previous literature focuses on the first aspect and shows the importance of the relative price effect, for given growth rates of consumption and ecosystem services. This paper focuses on intermediate ecosystem...

The purpose of the present paper is to examine theoretically and empirically how the maturity structure of government debt is affected by changes in its main macroeconomic determining factors. We organize our investigation around a maturity-structure model for Greece in which the optimal...

Tariffs and other policy distortions typically lower real national income relative to what it otherwise would have been for any given rate of factor accumulation. Even so, policy distortions may raise an economy's real measured growth rate and, somewhat deceivingly, give the impression that...