Since 1962, the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) of the Food and Agriculture Organisation/World Health Organisation has been responsible for developing standards, guidelines and other recommendations on the quality and safety of food to protect the health of consumers and to ensure fair practices in food trade. The mission of the CAC remains relevant, but a number of factors have shown the n...

What is the role of common shocks in driving the business cycles of small open economies? We investigate this question in a structural small open economy model featuring a realistic debt adjustment cost and common shocks. We estimate the model using data for 17 small developed and developing countries between 1900 and 2006. The estimated model attributes nearly 50% of the output ‡uctuations ove...

There is a substantial body of economic literature discussing various approaches to delimiting geographic markets.' These approaches, however, seldom have been applied to analyses of hospital markets. With the growth of multihospital systems 2 and the increased interest of the Federal Trade Commission and the United States Department of Justice in examining competition in the health care sector...

We give an explicit canonical transformation which transforms a generic chiral 2D dilaton gravity model into a free field theory.

The effects of the institutional determinants on trade in agricultural and food products are analyzed using a gravity model approach. We focus on the impact of the quality of governance and the similarity of institutions in explaining variation in bilateral agricultural and food trade patterns among the OECD countries. Results confirmed the separate effects for the institutional similarity and ...

By combining new data on bilateral asset holdings with data on securities regulation in an empirical gravity model, it is found that bilateral differences in securities regulation lead to decreased portfolio holdings. Hence, regulatory harmonization can foster financial integration. The results are especially strong for equity holdings. It is verified that the results do not just reflect genera...

This paper provides an original study into how democratization and globalization in‡uence transnational terrorism — examining the motives of terrorists and how democratic institutions and international integration in‡uence non-state economic actors. We employ a gravity model to investigate the relative importance of globalization and democratization on transnational terrorism and external con‡i...

In this empirical study all mergers that have been challenged by the U.S. antitrust agencies FTC and DOJ between 1995 and 2008 were analyzed in regard to the question to what extent and how the agencies assessed the innovation effects of mergers. Theoretical background is the still open question how negative effects of mergers on innovation should be taken into account in merger policy. Althoug...