Pulling the Strings: Party Group Coordinators in the European Parliament

Since its post-Lisbon increase in (legislative and non-legislative) powers, the European Parliament (EP) is more relevant than ever in the geographically diversified multilevel system of the EU. Party group coordinators occupy a crucial position in collective decision-making within the EP. However, knowledge about these pivotal actors is absent. This raises the question as to who these party group coordinators are, what they do, and what indeed makes a good coordinator. A new data set shows that in 2012, more than one-fifth of coordinators of the three largest and most influential groups are German, with British and Spanish coordinators ranking a distant second before Romanians. Among coordinators from NMS, only one-eighth were newcomers

The Gains from Variety in the European Union

Over the last decade, European Union members have experienced a dramatic increase in imports. This increase was accompanied by a strong growth in the number of imported goods and trading partners, indicating positive welfare gains for consumers via an extended set of consumption possibilities, as pointed out in the "New Trade Theory". In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006) to estimate structurally the gains from imported variety for the 27 countries of the European Union using highly disaggregated trade data at the HTS-8 level from Eurostat for the period of 1999 to 2008. Our results show that, within the European Union, especially “newer” and smaller member states exhibit high gains from newly imported varieties. Furthermore, we find that the vast majority of the gains from variety for consumers stem from intra-European Union trade

Variations on the Vev Flip-Flop: Instantaneous Freeze-out and Decaying Dark Matter

In this work we consider a simple model for dark matter and identify regions of parameter space where the relic abundance is set via kinematic thresholds, which open and close due to thermal effects. We discuss instantaneous freeze-out, where dark matter suddenly freezes-out when the channel connecting dark matter to the thermal bath closes, and decaying dark matter, where dark matter freezes-out while relativistic and later decays when a kinematic threshold temporarily opens. These mechanisms can occur in the vicinity of a one-step or a two-step phase transition. In all cases thermal effects provide this dynamic behaviour, while ensuring that dark matter remains stable until the present day.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures; v2: version matched to journal (JHEP), added a detailed discussion of further two-to-two processe

The Gains from Variety in the European Union

Over the last decade, European Union members have experienced a dramatic increase in imports. This increase was accompanied by a strong growth in the number of imported goods and trading partners, indicating positive welfare gains for consumers via an extended set of consumption possibilities, as pointed out in the "New Trade Theory". In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006) to estimate structurally the gains from imported variety for the 27 countries of the European Union using highly disaggregated trade data at the HTS-8 level from Eurostat for the period of 1999 to 2008. Our results show that, within the European Union, especially “newer†and smaller member states exhibit high gains from newly imported varieties. Furthermore, we find that the vast majority of the gains from variety for consumers stem from intra-European Union trade.European Union; Welfare Gains from Trade; Trade in Variety

The gains from variety in the European Union

In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006) to estimate the gains from imported variety for the 27 countries of the European Union using Eurostat data from the period of 1999 to 2008. Our results show that newer and smaller member states exhibit high gains from newly imported varieties.Welfare gains from trade; Trade in variety; European Union