So far, economic analyses of NATO enlargement have been restricted to aspects of regional security while political analyses focused on indirect peace-building effects on democracy in the first place. Our panel regressions for 25 post-communist countries for the period from 1996 to 2008 reveal...

This article contributes to the integration of "Neighbourhood Europeanization" in the literature on Europeanization. Based on insights from "Membership" and "Enlargement Europeanization", we reveal important inconsistencies of "Neighbourhood Europeanization" through ENP as well as a lack of...

Long-term beneficial welfare state reforms not only face opposition from powerful insiders and beneficiaries of the system in place. While potential losers from a policy change are often relatively easy to spot, ewll-designed reforms generate mostly diffuse gains, and the potential winners are...

In order to identify convergence patterns among the group of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) we analyze clusters of traditional OECD countries, i.e. EU-15 plus Norway and Switzerland, Anglo-Saxon non-EU countries plus Japan, and CEECs based on macro data on government regulation...

We explain economic growth by both politics, i.e. government activity including spending as well as regulation, and institutional quality and its interaction with politics. This extends previous work on institution building in transition by looking at its impact and, at the same time,...