After an extended process of reform the European Union has introduced direct payments to farmers which are decoupled from production decisions as a central element of its Common Agricultural Policy. They are also referred to as Single Farm Payments. In this paper we analyze the production and...

Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are...

The paper introduces a general approach to distributing households by size, which is based on recurrent procedure of estimating conditional proportions of households of a given size among households with the same or larger size. Based on formal study and on empirical evidence, models and methods...

Using several rounds of the Eurobarometer [EB] survey, we examine the relationship between lifetime fertility intentions and the 'Great Recession' in Europe. We suppose that the increase in unemployment rates observed between 2006 and 2011, the years in which the two EB surveys were conducted,...

Empirical evidence on the effects of age on mental health is diverse. Therefore, the paper aims to analyze the association between age and the prevalence of symptoms of depression. Based on SHARE, depressive symptoms of 28,069 persons from eleven European countries and Israel aged 50 to 84 years...

Eine wachsende Einkommenspolarisierung und die damit verbundene Einkommensspreizung erfahren in der öffentlichen Diskussion eine steigende Aufmerksamkeit. Eine Zunahme der Polarisierung der Einkommen ist nicht nur hinsichtlich des gesellschaftlichen Zusammen-hangs und des Empfindens von...

In 2000, the European Council set its sights on becoming the world's top knowledge-based economy. To that end, they aimed to achieve a goal of spending 3% of GDP on research and development by 2010. Their Lisbon Strategy recommended a number of efforts on the European Union and national levels,...

This paper analyzes the legal framework for telecommunications and the new media in the European Union. Based on an institutional economics model, the different levels of institutional interaction within the EU media regulation are explored. Compared to the US, the European market seems to...