We use recent farm household survey data from 5 Central European countries to explore the extent to which ill-functioning land and credit markets may present an obstacle to rural development. The first finding is that improved access to credit can, indeed, make a contribution to a more dynamic rural sector. A considerable share of rural households express their desire to expand agricultural cul...

The main purpose of this paper is to determine the applicability of the constitutional social rights in the so-called horizontal relations, i.e. the relations between private entities. Nowadays the constitutional rights are more and more often violated by private entities and not only by the state. The private entities interfere with the privacy of individuals, limit their freedom of expression...

The Spot Market Matters: Evidence on Implicit Contracts from Britain Based on the methodology of Beaudry and DiNardo (1991), this paper investigates the relative importance of the spot market and implicit contracts in the determination of British real wages. Empirical work is carried out separately for males and females with individuallevel data taken from the New Earnings Survey Panel for the ...

A fundamental assumption in this article is that not only the public administration but also semi-private and private agencies provide electronic intermediaries between public services and citizens in a quasi-market situation. The theoretical framework of this study views markets as constructed in contrast to natural phenomena. In these processes of construction the role of technologies such as...

Michael Lister has responded to my critique of his work with what Lakatos (1980) called a “problem shift”. In his original paper, Lister (2007) presented empirical evidence that selective welfare state institutions undermine norms of solidarity, which in turn depresses turnout in general elections. In my comment (Arzheimer 2008), I demonstrate that, while the hypothesis is certainly plausible, ...

The Black-Scholes theory, which is the main subject of this course and its sequel, is based on the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that arbitrages (the term will be defined shortly) do not exist in efficient markets. Although this is never completely true in practice, it is a useful basis for pricing theory, and we shall limit our attention (at least for now) to efficient (that is, arbitrage-free)...

Due to the strong complexity of financial markets, economics does not have a unified theory of price formation in financial markets. The most common assumption is the Efficient-Market Hypothesis, which has been attacked by a number of researchers, using different tools. There were varying degrees to which these tools complied with the formal definitions of efficiency and predictability. In our ...