The Political Economy and Public Choice approaches have promoted the study of interactions between the economy and the polity for over 60 years now. The present paper endeavours to provide a critical discussion of this literature and its achievements. In particular, it begins with the different approaches based on empirically tested or politometric models and it then proceeds to discuss different studies of the effects that particular rules of the game have on politico-economic outcomes. The third section of the paper will address studies that take institutions to be endogenous and aims to explain why particular institutions emerge. Finally, the question of whether Political Economy has been a success or a failure will be tackled. While the success in terms of the position it has gained in economic research and teaching is undeniable, a look at one of the most thriving recent areas of economics, happiness research, will reveal that some of its fundamental lessons are all too often disregarded. Key words:

by We study fairness and reciprocity in a Hawk-Dove game. A variety of recent models gives the same predictions for this game. This allows us to provide a general classification of individuals ’ types. Contrary to a large number of studies on different games over the last decade, we observe a large

of the forecast problem faced by the agents. We interpret this result as suggesting that beliefs-outcomes interaction may be an important element in explaining actual dynamics in general equilibrium systems of this type. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Nos. D50, D83. KEYWORDS:

We examine the role of both the volatility and levels of exchange rates in the determination of multinational enterprises ’ (MNEs) investments using a unique Korean dataset. These data provide a natural laboratory due to the Korean experience of a severe financial crisis in the late nineties. We find, first, that the behavior of foreign investors in Korea has changed following the 1997 crisis. The change in foreign direct investment (FDI) in response to exchange rate volatility is robust, while that to exchange rate level is quite mixed, which is consistent with recently developed real option-based FDI theory. Second, the effect of exchange rate volatility on FDI is persistent, whereas that of misalignment of level is only temporary, suggesting that MNEs regard volatility as a more generic determinant of foreign investment than misalignment of the exchange rate level. Third, we find strong evidence of nonlinearity between uncertainty and FDI, which may shed some light on why existing literature shows mixed results on the relation between exchange rate variables and FDI.

Many governments from euro area continue to adopt the EU reglementations and policies anti crisis. Members of governments and parliaments of the euro area try to maintain liquidity in the economic system at this fragile moment of transition between crisis and growth and to develop exit strategies for winding down stimulus programmers once recovery has firmly taken root and to adopt medium-term measures to restore budgetary level. In this work are presented some of the most significant anti-crisis measures taken by some governments in the euro area. A comparative analysis for some representative countries from the euro area has been done in order to conclude that some anti-crisis measures had the desired effect, while others have side effects that required further actions.

Recebido em 11 de março de 2011. Aceito em 14 de dezembro de 2011. We use a random-effects model to find the factors that affect the student evaluation of teaching (SET) scores. Dataset covers 6 semesters, 496 undergraduate courses related to 101 instructors and 89 disciplines. Our empirical findings are: (i) the class size affects negatively the SET score; (ii) instructors with more experience are better evaluated, but these gains reduce over time; (iii) participating in training programs, designed to improve the quality of teaching, did not increase the SET scores; (iv) instructors seem to be able to marginally ‘buy ’ a better evaluation by inflating students ’ grade. Finally, there are significant changes in the rankings when we adjust the SET score to eliminate the effects of variables beyond instructors ’ control. Despite these changes, they are not statistically significant.

Economic growth It is obvious that human capital is critical for economic growth. The exploration of the impact of human capital on growth could bring valuable information for policy makers to substantiate their development strategies and to stimulate factors leading to economic growth. The paper aims to investigate the relationships between human capital and economic growth in the romanian economy by analyzing the correlations between statistical variables measuring human capital and economic growth. Using a regression model, it is analyzed the impact of the educational and health capital on the economic output. In the paper, a linear regression model of the relation of human capital to economic growth is subjet of an empirical analysis, firstly, taking into consideration only education as human capital and secondly, incorporating in the model the both components: health and education. A strong correlation between educational variables and GDP, for 1990-2010, was found. The quality of the educational capital has a determinant role in the economic growth, the highly educated people are influencing more the economic output than the secondary educated ones. GDP per capita is negatively correlated with the number of worked hours and positively influenced by the life expectancy. The most important contribution contained by this article refers to the incorporation of the two components of human capital in the same econometric model explaining the economic growth. The added value of paper consists in offering suggestions and orientation for national educational policies.

Recebido em 05 de setembro de 2011. Aceito em 09 de abril de 2012. In this article the growth models of Feldman (1928) and Mahalanobis (1953) are exten-ded to consider the analysis of decisions of investment allocation in the context of the Post-Keynesian Growth Model. By adopting this approach it is possible to introduce distributive features in the Feldman-Mahalanobis model that allows us to determine the rate of investment allocation according to the equilibrium decisions of investment and savings. Finally, an additional condition is added to the Post-Keynesian Growth Model in order to fully characterise the equilibrium path in an extended version of this framework, where capital goods are also needed to produce capital goods.

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Ex post analysis of economic impacts from wind power development in U.S. counties