The Impact of EU Export Refunds on the African Continent: An Impact Assessment

The EU’s export refund policy has long been a source of controversy for its perceived impacts on third country markets. However, the EU Commission maintain that these concerns are largely historic as CAP reforms mean that export refunds are now used infrequently. The purpose of this article is therefore to assess the impacts of refunds in the wake of the 2003 reform of the CAP using two complementary analyses: first, an analysis using a computable general equilibrium model and second, two case studies to assess the potential impact of export refunds in selected African developing countries.     

Research activities and budget allocations among Federal Reserve Banks

This paper applies the theory of bureaucracy to the internal operation of the Federal Reserve System. According to the bureaucratic model, the Board of Governors will use budget allocations to the individual Reserve Banks as a means of controlling their provision of information. By examining the research publications of Reserve Banks, we find two Banks which began providing ‘adverse publicity’ for the System in recent years. The empirical analysis reveals that the budgets of these Banks have decreased following the changes in research agendas.     

A contractual model of the voting behavior of the supreme court: The role of the chief justice

Political scientists have long debated the role of the Supreme Court in public policymaking. Much of the debate has centered around the issue of judicial independence from political factors. Despite a rather extensive debate in the literature, the question of independence has rarely been subjected to systematic testing. This paper examines the role of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in linking decisions of the Court to the desires of Congress. Specifically, the paper focuses on the role of the Supreme Court Chief Justice as an agent of Congress that reacts to budgetary signals sent by the Congress. The resulting relationship between budgets allocated to the Court and decisions reached by the Court are analyzed from 1946 to 1988.