Should Market Liberalization Precede Democracy? Causal Relations between Political Preferences and Development * This paper is dedicated to the relation between market development and democracy. We distinguish contexts and preferences and ask whether it is true that the demand for democracy only emerges after a certain degree of market development is reached, and whether, conversely, democratiz...

In this paper, we examine whether the imperfections in the credit market spill over to the labor market. We examine the case of a country that experienced a very high degree of imperfections in the financial markets, but underwent substantial changes in 1992 due to the liberalization brought by the European unification and other institutional changes. Italy is therefore a good laboratory to stu...

While the freedom of service provision is one of the pillars of the Single Market Project, such deregulation clashes with national wage regulation and social policy-making. This article examines recent attempts by the European Commission to further promote liberalization, epitomized in the so-called ‘Bolkestein Directive’, as well as three case studies of political conflict involving the transn...

1 Background The Japanese government is conducting electricity system reform in stages and plans to complete this reform by 2020. Historically, all electricity related services in Japan have been overseen by regional monopolistic entities. After the reform is completed, both the wholesale and retail electricity markets will be perfectly competitive, as in most countries in the EU, and many stat...

We analyze the e!ects of trade liberalization on "rms' decisions and pro"ts in a vertical product di!erentiation model with countries which have di!erent characteristics. Firms decide product speci"cations at the beginning of the game, in which autarky is followed by trade liberalization (whose date is anticipated). Our analysis suggests that a "rm located in a large (or rich) country is the li...