Why some EU institutions litigate more often than others: exploring opportunity structures and actor motivation in horizontal annulment actions

Why Do Some Countries Default More Often Than Others? The Role of Institutions

Electoral Institutions and the Politics of Coalitions: Why Some Democracies Redistribute More Than Others

Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others. We show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the...

Why Do Some Universities Generate More Start-ups than Others

The results of this study provide insight into why some universities generate more new companies to exploit their intellectual property than do others. We compare four different explanations for cross-institutional variation in new firm formation rates from university technology licensing offices (TLOs) over the 1994–1998 period—the availability of venture capital in the university area; the co...

Human feelings: why are some more aware than others?

A recent article reports that human perception of heartbeat timing is mediated by right (non-dominant) anterior insular cortex, and that the activity and the size of this region is directly correlated with individuals' subjective awareness of inner body feelings and emotionality. These results support the somatic-marker hypothesis of consciousness (a modern successor to the James-Lange theory o...

Why do some fish fight more than others?

Reversible changes in how readily animals fight can be explained in terms of adaptive responses to differences in the costs and benefits of fighting. In contrast, long-term differences in aggressiveness raise a number of questions, including why animals are consistent with respect to this trait, why aggressiveness is often linked to general risk taking, and why aggressive and nonaggressive anim...