THEODORE J. WEIMAN On July 22, 2004, the House of Representatives passed the Marriage Protection Act of 2004, a bill that would strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over cases challenging the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Two months later, the House passed a similar bill that would curtail federal court jurisdiction for challenges to the constitutionality of the Ple...

With the end of the Supermarket Revolution in the 1970s, new forms of horizontal, vertical, and geographic competition have appeared to chaflenge the supremacy of the supermarket format. New retail formats like warehouse stores, supercenters, and fast-food outlets appear to affect local retail supermarket prices. Slotting allowances, coupons, and electronic data gathering have intensified retai...

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face specific development problems in addition to weak institutions. Given their geographic and economic ...

Financial constraints have been found to play an important role on various aspects of firm behavior. Yet, their effects on firm survival have been largely neglected. We use a panel of 9420 newly established UK firms over the period 1997-2002 to study the effects of financial variables on firms’ failure probabilities, differentiating firms into globally engaged and purely domestic. Estimating a ...

Financial constraints have been found to play an important role on various aspects of firm behavior. Yet, their effects on firm survival have been largely neglected. We use a panel of 61496 UK firms over the period 19972002 to study the effects of financial variables on firms’ failure probabilities, differentiating firms into globally engaged and purely domestic. Estimating a wide range of spec...

Recent studies have challenged the view that trade openness leads to more specialization in countries’ trade. Using a panel of 116 countries over 35 years, we show that openness can be positively associated with both specialization and diversification, depending on the measure used. Moreover, for developing countries in our sample, the effect of openness on trade structure depends on the type o...