Institutional Factors Affecting Agricultural Land Markets. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 16, February 2012

This paper analyses the main institutional factors affecting the rental and sales markets for agricultural land. Particular attention is paid to the effects of the common agricultural policy on land markets, and more specifically the underlying mechanism through which agricultural subsidies are capitalised into land values and farmland rents. This paper also provides a broad overview of the empirical studies that estimate the impact of agricultural support policies on land rents and land prices. Various other fundamental factors that affect agricultural land markets are discussed, such as land market institutions and regulations, transaction costs, credit market constraints and levels of profitability, the legal means of contract enforcement and land use alternatives.

Competitive Representative Claimsmaking: Party Politicians and Institutional Factors in the Case of EU Budget Negotiations

This study provides an empirical comparative case study of representative claims-making in EU budget negotiations. Two questions are addressed in this paper. First, the paper asks what the role of elected or appointed partisan politicians is in comparison to other representatives. This question is relevant given the reported increasing importance of non-elected representatives. Secondly, the paper asks what the influence of institutional factors is on the practice of representative claims-making. As representative claims-making unfolds in the public sphere, the institutional factors of the public sphere may affect both the claimants it provides a platform for as well as constituencies represented. The paper finds that politicians continue to perform a crucial role in representation, both with regards to their prominence in the public sphere and with regards to the plurality of constituencies represented in their claims. Although institutional factors clearly affect claimants, there are much less pronounced – though noticeable – differences in the constituencies represented in different public spheres. The overall picture is one of a highly plural representative space in which multiple claimants compete with each other to get their message across. In doing so, claimants address the interests of multiple constituencies. It may well be the inherent competition among claimants, fostered by institutional factors, that ensures the plurality of the EU representative space.

Can Policy Make Us Happier? Individual characteristics socioeconomic factors, and life satisfaction in Central and Eastern Europe. Bruges European Economic Research (BEER) Papers 22/November 2011

In the last decade, Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries have witnessed a rapid economic convergence vis-à-vis Western Europe. However, this rapid growth has not been matched by a similarly rapid increase in life satisfaction, which has remained low in the European context. This paper sets out to address this conundrum, by looking at the individual and macro-level determinants of individual life satisfaction in ten CEE countries. The results highlight that while Central and Eastern Europeans share the same individual determinants of happiness as people in the West (despite some significant cross-country variation), macroeconomic and institutional differences are the key factors behind the lack of convergence in life satisfaction. On the macroeconomic side, GDP growth is still a source of increasing well-being, but the happiness bonus associated with it is becoming smaller. The different levels of individual happiness in CEE are therefore mostly determined by institutional factors such as corruption, government spending and decentralisation, making policies aimed at enhancing institutional quality capable of bringing about substantial improvements in the overall life satisfaction of the people in the region.

Forecasting migration between the EU, V4 and Eastern Europe. Impact of visa abolition. OSW Report, July 2014

This book is the result of one year of solid work among a multinational research team assembled from seven states (Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova). It aims at a detailed analysis of migration patterns and migration forecasts from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova to the EU/V4. In particular, the nexus between EU visa policy and migration dynamics as well as the impact of economic, political and institutional factors on migration from Eastern Europe have been investigated. The importance of migration policy must be stressed here. Together with demand for the foreign labour force (labour market needs, level of wages, existing work opportunities) and migration networks (including ethnic links), migration policy has a powerful influence on the scale, directions and characteristics of human flows.

Women's Labour Market Performance in Europe: Trends and Shaping Factors. CEPS Special Report, September 2012

We investigate the changes in women’s employment patterns across EU countries over the last 20 years both in terms of labour market participation and type of jobs using individual data from ECHP and EUSILC databases. Using a logistic multilevel model, we then pin down the role played by institutional and policy changes in explaining women’s employment. The key results indicate that women’s employment trends are related to the institutional and policy changes that have been introduced in almost all European countries since the end of the 1990s. Such changes had an important impact on the labour market opportunities’ of women by affecting the quality of potential jobs available, the chances to (re-)enter the labour market and the opportunity costs of employment (vs. non-employment).

Coalitions, Power and Institutional Change in Global Patent Politics. IES WORKING PAPER 2/2013

With the 1995 Agreement on Trade - related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a centralised rule - system for the international governance of patents was put in place under the general framework of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Since then, the number of patent – related institutions has increased monotonically on the multilateral, plurilateral and bilateral levels. I will explain this case of institutional change by focusing on the norm – setting activities of both industrialised and developing countries, arguing that both groups constitute internally highly cohesive coalitions in global patent politics, while institutional change occurs when both coalitions engage in those negotiating settings in which they enjoy a comparative advantage over the other coalition. Specifically, I make the point that industrialised countries’ norm – setting activities take place on the plurilateral and bilateral level, where economic factors can be effectively translated into political outcomes while simultaneously avoiding unacceptably high legitimacy costs; whereas developing countries, on the other hand, use various multilateral United Nations (UN) forums where their claims possess a high degree of legitimacy, but cannot translate into effective political outcomes. The paper concludes with some remarks on how this case yields new insights into ongoing debates in institutionalist International Relations (IR), as pertaining to present discussions on “regime complexity”.