Poland's Accession to the European Union: Demand for Protection of Selected Sensitive Products

This paper analyses the expected changes in external tariffs and imports in Poland after accession to the European Union. We find that around 14% of all manufacturing commodity groups in the Harmonised System will experience tariff reductions of over 10 percentage points, while for agricultural goods tariff comparisons are complicated by very different tariff systems and may be overrated, since applied tariffs are often lower than those legislated. Based on gravity estimates we also find onlly few relatively narrowly defined commodities will experience import growth rates of above 20%. More widely defined sensitive commodities are subject to much smaller but still important import growth     

The nonobserved economy in the European Union

To better understand the share of the nonobserved economy (NOE) in the European Union, especially on the PIIGS, we estimate, through the multiple indicators multiple causes model, the path between 1980 and 2013. The model includes (i) the tax burden (disaggregated into direct and indirect taxes), a proxy of regulation burden, the unemployment rate and self-employment as causes of the NOE economy; (ii) the GDP and the labour force participation ratio as indicators of the NOE economy. In particular, the estimated weight of NOE as a percentage of official GDP was always higher in the PIIGS group.     

The Dilemmas of Tax Coordination in the Enlarged European Union

This study evaluates the economic effects of corporate tax coordinationin the enlarged European Union (EU) using a computable generalequilibrium model. Our main findings are as follows: (i) Corporatetax coordination can yield modest aggregate welfare gains. The2004 enlargement of the EU has increased the potential gainsfrom tax harmonization, provided corporate tax rates and taxbases are harmonized at their unweighted averages. (ii) Allscenarios for coordination leave some EU Member States as winnersand others as losers. An agreement on tax coordination is thereforelikely to require elaborate compensation mechanisms. (iii) Thelarge and diverse country effects suggest that Enhanced Cooperationfor a subset of the Member States may be the most likely routetowards tax coordination. (iv) Identifying winners and losersfrom coordination for the purpose of a compensation mechanismmay be problematic, since countries experiencing gains in GDPand welfare tend to lose tax revenues, and vice versa. (JELcodes: H25, H73, H87)     

The geometry of voting power: Weighted voting and hyper-ellipsoids

Suppose legislators represent districts of varying population, and their assembly's voting rule is intended to implement the principle of one person, one vote. How should legislators' voting weights appropriately reflect these population differences? An analysis requires an understanding of the relationship between voting weight and some measure of the influence that each legislator has over collective decisions. We provide three new characterizations of weighted voting that embody this relationship. Each is based on the intuition that winning coalitions should be close to one another. The locally minimal and tightly packed characterizations use a weighted Hamming metric. Ellipsoidal separability employs the Euclidean metric: a separating hyper-ellipsoid contains all winning coalitions, and omits losing ones. The ellipsoid's proportions, and the Hamming weights, reflect the ratio of voting weight to influence, measured as Penrose–Banzhaf voting power. In particular, the spherically separable rules are those for which voting powers can serve as voting weights.     

Distance in time between transition economies and the European Union

The time distance methodology used offers a new perspective to the problem, an additional statistical measure, and a presentation tool for policy analysis and debate readily understood by policy makers, media and general public. Disparity between the analysed transition economies and EU countries is considerably smaller for other indicators than for GDP per capita. Compared with Ireland, Portugal and Greece Slovenia was in 1995 in 13 cases behind (but time lag of Slovenia never exceeded 10 years) and in 13 cases ahead of them. Sicherl (1997a) discusses application of S-distance to time series regressions, models, forecasting and monitoring. First version received: October 1995/final version received: April 1998     

The costs and benefits of eastern enlargement: the impact on the EU and central Europe

Eastern enlargement of the EU is a central pillar in Europe's post-Cold War architecture. Keeping the eastern countries out seriously endangers their economic transition, and economic failure in the east could threaten peace and prosperity in western Europe. The perceived economic costs and benefits will dictate the enlargement's timing. There are four parts to the calculus – the costs and the benefits in the east and in the west. Here we break new ground in estimating the economic benefits of enlargement for east and west using simulations in a global applied general equilibrium model. Our analysis includes a scenario in which joining the EU significantly reduces the risk premium on investment in the east – with resulting huge benefits to the new entrants. We also review the existing literature on the EU budget costs and arrive at a surprisingly well-determined 'consensus' estimate, which we support with a new political economy analysis of the budget. The bottom line is unambiguous and strongly positive: enlargement is a very good deal for both the EU incumbents and the new members.     

Voting requirements, concessions, international side payments and the European Monetary Union

This paper addresses the question of criteria for selection of EMU members. We identify two factors in the decision process: (1) The costs and benefits which the individual countries attribute to alternative EMU arrangements (`hard-core', medium-sized, all EU members), and (2) the binding institutional restrictions, i.e., the distribution of votes in the European Council and the minimum vote requirements. Within this framework the EU countries are assigned to different groups according to their degree of convergence. Based on stability concessions and side payments these groups decide on the final EMU composition. We show that minimum vote requirements can lead to a suboptimal size of the EMU and can threaten the feasibility of a multi-speed monetary union.     

Diplomatic relations and cross-border investments in the European Union

This study investigates the extent to which diplomatic relations are related to cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) activities in the European Union during the years 2001–2019. Implementing a gravity model, we find a positive relationship between diplomatic distance and M&A activities, meaning that weaker diplomatic relations are linked to increases in inward M&As. This finding holds when foreign investors target high-tech firms, are private rather than state-owned enterprises, or buy larger shares of the target companies. This evidence suggests that cross-border acquisitions could be a way for the investing firm to mitigate issues related to weak diplomatic relations, such as access to host markets’ information and technological knowledge.     

Exchange rate policy during transition to the European Monetary Union: The option of euroization

Countries of central eastern Europe which are candidates for accession to the European Union face fundamental challenges in the conduct of macroeconomic policies. These countries are characterized by growth rates faster than those of EU countries, along with large current account deficits and an equilibrium appreciation of the real exchange rate. In such a context, an early adoption of the euro may be beneficial to central eastern European countries, while the ERM‐II system and the Maastricht criterion on inflation may give rise to serious drawbacks for candidate countries. JEL classification: F15, F41     

Effects of runoff voting rules on number of parties and candidates' political experience: Evidence from a law change in Peru

We study the effect of a change in electoral rules on political competition, measured by the number of candidates and their political experience. We explore the effects of a change in legislation, introduced a year before the gubernatorial elections in Peru on the number of parties that participated in these elections. We also investigate how the legislative change affected the political experience of the candidates. Given that the legislative change did not apply to elections for provincial mayors, we use those elections as a control group, in a difference-in-differences design. Our estimates show the number of parties registered increased by a margin of around 2.2 after the legislative change. The change also increased the candidates' years of accumulated political experience, particularly in the subsequent gubernatorial elections.     

The empirical estimation of the cost-minimizing jury size and voting rule in civil trials

Since the early 1970s, the literature examining the court system has placed much emphasis on the importance of the jury size and voting rule when analyzing the jury decision-making process. In addition, researchers have also used deductive reasoning to theoretically determine the cost-minimizing jury size and voting rule with regards to Type I and Type II errors. In this paper, we take this analysis one step further by empirically estimating the cost-minimizing jury size and voting rule in civil jury trials.     

The impact of the European Union fiscal rules on economic growth

This paper analyses whether Maastricht and Stability and Growth Pact fiscal rules have affected growth in the European Union negatively. A growth equation is specified for a group of 15 European Union countries (and 8 OECD countries) over the period 1970-2005 to analyse this issue. Panel estimations using fixed-effects, pooled mean group and system-GMM estimators show that the institutional changes that occurred in the European Union after 1992 were not harmful to growth. Moreover, results show that growth is slightly higher in the period in which the fulfilment of the 3% criteria for the deficit started to be officially assessed, i.e. after 1997.     

Promoting sustainable public finances in the European Union: The role of fiscal rules and government efficiency

New indices of fiscal rule strength are constructed and, using a dynamic panel econometric model for 27 EU countries over the period 1990–2012, we assess whether national fiscal rules alone help to promote sustainable public finances in the EU or whether they must be supported by good governance in order to be effective. We find that fiscal rules are effective in reducing structural primary deficits at all levels of government efficiency. However, the effect is smaller as government efficiency increases, indicating that fiscal rules and government efficiency are institutional substitutes in terms of promoting fiscal sustainability. We also find that balanced budget rules are the most effective form of fiscal rules. Multiple fiscal rules are found to enhance fiscal solvency. Other institutional features that enhance the effectiveness of fiscal rules are transparency of policies and commitment to implementation of fiscal programs. Supranational rules, however, do not affect the effectiveness of national fiscal rules in reducing the deficit bias. Our results are robust to alternative estimation methods and endogeneity assumptions.     

The structure of bias in peer voting systems: lessons from the Eurovision Song Contest

This paper assesses whether and how common characteristics of jury members or peer voters affect the outcomes of voting systems. In particular, we analyze to what extent these common features result in voting bias. We take as a case study the Eurovision Song Contest for which an extensive amount of historical data is available. In contrast to earlier studies we analyze the impact of common factors on the bias individually for each country, which is necessary to substantiate the publicly debated accusations of regional block voting by certain groups of countries. We establish strong evidence for voting bias in the song contest on the basis of geography, even after correction for culture, language, religion and ethnicity. However, these effects do generally not correspond to the usual accusations. We believe that our findings extend to all instances where groups of jury members or peer voters share certain common factors, which may cause voting bias. It is important to identify such structures explicitly, as it can help avoiding bias in the first place. The authors are grateful to Marieke van Dijk for excellent research assistance and to Laurens Swinkels, Ieva Pudane, Gijsbert van Lomwel, Jelena Stefanovic, and Bas van den Heuvel for useful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.     

On the inconsistent behavior in voting for incumbents and for term limitation

This paper considers the seemingly inconsistent behavior of individuals who simultaneously vote for incumbents and for limitations on their terms in office. We argue that such behavior may occur even if voters pursue their self-interests in both candidate and term-limitation elections. First, we formulate elections for Congressional candidates as a two-person game, where each candidate maximizes votes by proposing a distribution of benefits to voters. Then we discuss the term limitation at the state level, where voters in each district compare, over time, the average benefits obtained from two alternative series of campaign games: one with a longer tenure associated with no term limit and the other with a shorter tenure created by the introduction of a term limit. In elections of candidates for Congress, the incumbent is successful because he can generate more aggregate benefits for voters. We show, however, that at some critical point of the tenure, his behavior will be less beneficial to his core constituents. In term-limitation elections, those voters tend to support a term limit. In some cases, they represent a majority in the state, and term limits are enacted. Received: February 23, 1999; revised version: January 24, 2000     

Why votes have value: Instrumental voting with overconfidence and overestimation of others' errors

We perform an experiment in which subjects bid for participating in a vote. The setting precludes conflicts of interests or direct benefits from voting. The theoretical value of participating in the vote is therefore zero if subjects have only instrumental reasons to vote and form correct beliefs. Yet, we find that experimental subjects are willing to pay for the vote and that they do so for instrumental reasons. The observed voting premium in the main treatment is high and can only be accounted for if some subjects either overestimate their pivotality or do not pay attention to pivotality at all. A model of instrumental voting, which assumes that individuals are overconfident and that they overestimate the errors of others, is consistent with results from treatments that make the issue of pivotality salient to experimental subjects.     

Supply‐chain trade and labor market outcomes: The case of the 2004 European Union enlargement

The structure of international trade is increasingly characterized by fragmentation of production processes and trade policy. Yet, how trade policy affects supply‐chain trade is largely unexplored territory. This paper shows how the accession of 10 Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) to the European Union affected European supply‐chain trade. We find that accession primarily fostered CEECs’ integration in global value chains of other entrants. Smaller integration benefits stem for East–West trade in services for lower‐skill activities. These increases in value‐added exports translate into sizeable job creation.     

Budgetary impact of the utilization of buprenorphine/naloxone sublingual film and tablet for Medicaid in the United States

Abstract

Objectives:

The buprenorphine/naloxone combination for the treatment of opioid dependence is available in a film or tablet formulation. Recent retrospective studies demonstrated that treatment with the sublingual film formulation is associated with improved treatment retention and lower healthcare costs. In March 2013, generic buprenorphine/naloxone tablets were approved in the US. A budget impact model was built to compare healthcare expenditures for different market shares of sublingual film and tablet.     

Voting on voting with the feet: a cross-county analysis of the Tennessee popular referenda to secede from the union

We analyze a unique case of voting on voting with the feet, when Tennessee twice considered secession from the Union in 1861 by popular referenda. The initial votes to hold a convention, and to send disunion delegates to a convention, failed, but after the Confederate states adopted a new constitution and the bombing of Fort Sumter took place, a second set of votes to separate from the union, and to join the confederacy, passed. Regression results support the importance of both economic interests and political tendencies, along with regional differences, in explaining the variation in votes across counties. Class distinctions were not found to be significant.