Related papers: Brexit: The Belated Threat
When confronted with a host of issues, groups often save time and energy by compiling many issues into a single bundle when making decisions. This reduces the time and cost of group decision-making, but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes…
This paper examines whether there is a premium in country size. We study whether there are significant gains from being a small or a large country in terms of certain socioeconomic indicators and how large this premium is. Using panel data…
This work is produced by researchers at the Neuropolitics Research Lab, School of Social and Political Science and the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. In this report we provide an analysis of the social media posts on…
The problem of designing an optimal weighted voting system for the two-tier voting, applicable in the case of the Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU), is investigated. Various arguments in favour of the square root voting…
The rise of the internet and computational power in recent years allowed for the exponential growth of misinformation phenomena. An issue that was a non-issue a decade ago, became a challenge for societal cohesion. The emergence of this new…
This study investigates the impact of acute health shocks on early labour market exits among individuals aged 50 and over in Europe. Utilising data from Waves 1-8 of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE),…
I study how political bias and audience costs impose domestic institutional constraints that affect states' capacity to reach peaceful agreements during crises. With a mechanism design approach, I show that the existence of peaceful…
Importing renewable energy to Europe offers many potential benefits, including reduced energy costs, lower pressure on infrastructure development, and less land-use within Europe. However, there remain many open questions: on the achievable…
Formation of consensus, in binary yes/no type of voting, is a well defined process. However, even in presence of clear incentives, the dynamics involved can be incredibly complex. Specifically, formations of large groups of similarly…
The power grid defines one of the most important technological networks of our times and sustains our complex society. It has evolved for more than a century into an extremely huge and seemingly robust and well understood system. But it…
The Eurovision Song Contest is a popular annual international song competition organized by the European Broadcasting Union. The winner is decided by the audience and expert juries from each participating nation, which is why the analysis…
The average revenue, or market value, of wind and solar energy tends to fall with increasing market shares, as is now evident across European electricity markets. At the same time, these markets have become more interconnected. In this…
When a publication is cited it generates a benefit. Through the country affiliations of the citing authors, it is possible to work upwards, tracing the countries that benefit from results produced in a national research system. In this work…
I study the economic effects of testing during the outbreak of a novel disease. I propose a model where testing permits isolation of the infected and provides agents with information about the prevalence and lethality of the disease.…
We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…
Among the central tenets of globalization is free migration of labor. Although much has been written about its benefits, little is known about the limitations of globalization, including how immigration affects the anti-globalist sentiment.…
This paper constructs internationally consistent measures of macroeconomic uncertainty. Our econometric framework extracts uncertainty from revisions in data obtained from standardized national accounts. Applying our model to post-WWII…
In 2018, allowance prices in the EU Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) experienced a run-up from persistently low levels in previous years. Regulators attribute this to a comprehensive reform in the same year, and are confident the new price…
If checks and balances are aimed at protecting citizens from the government's abuse of power, why do they sometimes weaken them? We address this question in a laboratory experiment in which subjects choose between two decision rules: with…
This paper studies the dynamics of opinion formation and polarization in social media. We investigate whether users' stance concerning contentious subjects is influenced by the online discussions they are exposed to and interactions with…