How should large and small countries be represented in a currency union?

We present a simple model of optimal representation in a federal central bank that balances two opposing forces: the wish to insulate common monetary policy from changing preferences at the national level, and the attempt to avoid an overly active or passive reaction to idiosyncratic national economic shocks. A perfect match between economic size and voting rights is rarely optimal, and neither is the “one country, one vote principle”. There are indications that the pattern of over- and under-representation of member countries in the ECB Council might be extreme.     

An Illicit Love Affair During the Third Reich: Who is My Grandfather?*

More than 60 years after an illicit love affair had occurred between Erika H, wife of a Wehrmacht soldier, and a Polish slave worker during World War II, we could clarify the blood relationships of her daughter Uta. When Erika H had become pregnant both of the men could have fathered the child. Erika H was found guilty of fraternization and imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She gave birth to Uta and died there in 1944. Uta survived the war as did Erika's husband Gustav, who accepted Uta as his child. Blood samples from family members were taken and DNA extracted. A panel of 16 short tandem repeat (STR) loci were amplified and separated by capillary electrophoresis and the likelihoods calculated using the MLINK software. The combined genotypes yielded a cumulative likelihood ratio of over 200,000 against paternity of Gustav H. This case serves to illustrate the utility of STR profiles for complex deficiency kinship analysis.     

An analysis of congressional health policy voting in the 1970s

This paper analyzes nine health policy votes in the U.S. House of Representatives. The votes all occurred between 1973 and 1980 and include such issues as health planning, health maintenance organizations, cost containment, and professional standards review organizations. The objective of this analysis is to examine the independent contribution of variables indigenous to health issues while controlling for party identification and ideology. The influence of health providers, measured by the effect of the number of state medical association members in each state, is significant in the findings. The state and local share of Medicaid expenses is also significant in explaining several votes. Contributions from political action committees were not important until 1979, when the rising costs of campaigns gave them more influence, and when our measures of their influence improved. By the time Congress voted in 1979 on hospital cost containment legislation, the PAC variable surpassed even the AMA variable in importance.     

Social norms and religion in Europe and Asia. A cultural comparison

  I shall describe moral sanctions in countries where Christian values prevail and then give an outline of the moral system in Theravada Buddhist countries. Then I shall point out some of the different orientations of the two systems. Finally I shall draw attention to some practical social consequences of the perceived differences.     

The ‘Bulgarian ethnic model’—reality or ideology?

The notion of the ‘Bulgarian ethnic model’ has become part and parcel of the rhetoric of Bulgaria's political elite. While often used to acknowledge the political participation of the Turkish minority, which has played a stabilising role in post-communist Bulgaria, the notion of the ‘Bulgarian ethnic model’ conceals other important aspects of ethnic relations in Bulgaria. The article considers three factors that render the notion of the ‘Bulgarian ethnic model’ problematic: the existence of racism, discrimination and exclusion; the issue of minority rights; and the popularity of nationalist parties.     

Mobile Government Services: An Empirical Analysis of Mobile Government Attractiveness

The development of modern information and communication technology (ICT) fundamentally impacts the way citizens and governments interact with each other. In this context, mobile ICT is an essential driver for governments around the world to provide public services to citizens and organizations. Against this background, mobile government has significantly increased in importance for practitioners and has become a fruitful field of scientific research. Given the lack of empirical research on the attractiveness of mobile government, this study examines the key determinants of mobile government attractiveness.     

Six Rather Unusual Propositions about Terrorism

The costs of terrorism very often come mostly from the fear and consequent reaction (or overreaction) it characteristically inspires (qualities stoked by the terrorism industry), not from its direct effects which are usually comparatively limited. Therefore, policies designed to deal with terrorism should focus more on reducing fear and anxiety as inexpensively as possible than on objectively reducing the rather limited dangers terrorism is likely actually to pose. Doing nothing (or at least refraining from overreacting) after a terrorist attack is not necessarily unacceptable, and, despite U. S. overreaction, the campaign against terror is generally going rather well because, no matter how much they might disagree on other issues (most notably on war in Iraq), there is a compelling incentive for states to cooperate to deal with a common problem.