About

Welcome to the wonderful and interesting world of economics.

About the author

Vuk Vukovic, see my webpage here

I am a PhD student at the University of Oxford, Pembroke College, and I hold a Master of Science degree from the London School of Economics.

I worked at the Zagreb School of Economics and Management (2012-2016) where I taught Political Economy, Public Finance, International Economics and Principles of Economics. In the summer of 2013 I was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. I am also a research fellow for the Adam Smith Institute (ASI). Apart for the ASI I write occasionally for the Oxford University Press blog, Institute of Economic Affairs, and the Centre for Policy Studies, while in Croatian I write for Banka and Jutarnji list.

 Outside the academia I co-founded (and am a director of) Oraclum Intelligence Systems Ltd, a start-up specialized in election forecasting, big data analysis and visualization, and market research. 


My research: (the link is to the research on my personal webpage, it contains the most updated version)
(also @ ResearchGate)

Working papers:
      - preview of findings here
=> “Proxy Politics, Economic Protest, or Traditionalist Backlash: Croatia’s Referendum on the Constitutional Definition of Marriage” (2016) (with Josip Glaurdić)
=> "Granting votes: Political economy of intergovernmental grants in Croatia" (with Josip Glaurdić), August 2015
- "Post-war Voters as Fiscal Liberals: Spending, Capital Outlays, and Subsidies" (with Josip Glaurdić), September 2015

Published papers:
=> "To Invest or Not to Invest, That is the Question: Analysis of Firm Behavior Under Anticipated Shocks" (with Dejan Kovač, Nikola Kleut, and Boris Podobnik), August 2016, PLoS ONE 11(8): e0158782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0158782
=> "Voting after war: Legacy of conflict and the economy as determinants of electoral support in Croatia" (with Josip Glaurdić), Electoral Studies, Volume 42 (June 2016) pages 135–145. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2016.02.012
(author's post-print)
      - preview of findings in daily newspaper Jutarnji list (in Croatian)
=> "Proxy politics, economic protest, or traditionalist backlash: Croatia's referendum on the constitutional definition of marriage" (with Josip Glaurdić), Europe-Asia Studies, Volume 68 (5): 803-825. (July 2016)=> "Does the Wage Gap between Private and Public Sectors Encourage Political Corruption?" (2015) (with Boris Podobnik and H. Eugene Stanley). PLoS ONE 10(10): e0141211. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141211
=> "Prosperity and peace: Economic interests and war legacy in Croatia's EU referendum vote" (2015) (with Josip Glaurdić) European Union Politics, December 2015, vol. 16(4): 577-600.
=> "Croatia: Challenges after EU Accession" (with Luka Orešković) in E.E. Zeff and E.B. Pirro (eds.) The European Union and the Member States, 3rd Edition, Lynne Reinner Publishers, USA, 2015
=> "The Global Financial Crisis: A Political Economy Approach" in J.L.Grant (ed.) Perspectives on the Global Financial Crisis From Emerging Managers and Public Policy Makers, JLG Research, February 2014, Boston, MA, pp. 61-85. - "Unburdening Enterprise" Adam Smith Institute Paper (October, 2012) - covered in the Financial Times, see summary here.
=> "Political Economy of the US financial crisis", (2011) Financial Theory and Practice Vol.35(1): 91-128  - see here for a summary

Book reviews:
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (July 2012, also published in the Financial Theory and Practice, in September 2012)
- Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy by Mark Pennington (June 2012)
- South East Europe after the Crisis by William Bartlett and Vassilis Monastiriotis (June 2011)

Op-eds, blog posts and other texts:
- Oxford University Press blog (inequality)
- VoxEU (institutional reform, austerity debate)
- Adam Smith Institute writings (on regulation, SMEs, fiscal consolidation, taxes, housing, fiscal policy, unemployment, productivity, eurozone and general libertarian topics);
- Institute of Economic Affairs (fiscal consolidation, interest ratres, Greece, eurozone, and institutional reform)
- Centre for Policy Studies (recovery, financial crisis, structural reform)
- Banka Magazin (in Croatian) (fiscal consolidation, NGDP targeting, fiscal stimulus, technology and unemployment, public choice theory, Margaret Thatcher, formal and informal institutions, US budget bargaining game, Coase in memoriam, Spain's political crisis, Economics as a science etc.)
- Jutarnji list (in Croatian) (policy reforms, business, government, institutions, election forecasting project)
- Lider (in Croatian) (monetary policy; education)
- Poslovni Dnevnik (in Croatian) (taxes, institutional reform)

- Interview for Globus (in Croatian, various econ topics, reforms, corruption, Greece, institutions, etc.)
- Interview of the week on Soundset Radio (in Croatian, about political corruption, my paper, and the reforms in Croatia)
- Interview for Jutarnji list (in Croatian, about myself and my paper)
- Interview on Hrvatski Radio, Treći Program (in Croatian, about New Institutional Economics)
- Interview for Slobodna Dalmacija (commenting economic policies of the Croatian government)
- Interview for Večernji list
- TV appearances (HRT, RTL)
All media coverage available here

My LinkedIn profile


About the blog

The blog covers issues on economics and political economy in general, and concerning issues in the US, UK and the Eurozone in particular. It also touches upon certain topics of global ramifications, and occasionally some economic theory. It offers comments and opinions on various macroeconomic issues such as the 2008 financial crisis, the subsequent recovery and its regulatory responses, monetary policy, fiscal policy, but also a closer look into structural and institutional reforms, the austerity vs. stimulus debate, economic freedom and cronyism, technological progress and a range of other political economy issues.

I do hope you enjoy the blog, and find its posts thought provoking or just interesting enough to leave a comment.

_________

Disclaimer

By posing a comment and/or viewing the content on the blog you agree to the following terms and conditions.

Terms and conditions: Any comment that will insult on a racial, national, religious, gender or any other issue will be removed. Constructive criticism is more than welcomed, but there will be zero tolerance for abuse of any kind.

Views expressed in this blog are of Mr Vuk Vukovic alone and he bears full responsibility for the ideas presented in his writings. Any unauthorized use of the material in the blog for personal, academic, commercial or any other use is strictly forbidden and will be considered plagiarism.

Popular posts from this blog

Short-selling explained (case study: movie "Trading Places")

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After seeing the movie "Trading Places" (1983), starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, for the thousandth time during the holiday season, I decided to write a quick post explaining what happened at the end of this movie that gets so many people puzzled (including me for the first couple of times I've seen it). This entertaining 80s comedy can actually teach you more about finance and trading than any other Hollywood movie (not counting documentaries), including the infamous "Wall Street" (1987), starring Michael Douglas as the ruthless Gordon Gecko, and especially the latest Scorsese film "The Wolf of Wall Street" (2013). Anyway, we all know the story from Trading Places. Dan Aykroyd plays a snobbish investor Louis Winthorpe ("the Third"), while Eddie Murphy plays a street con artist Billy Ray Valentine whose lives get reversed as a result of a bet between two cruel millionaires, the Duke brothers. The Dukes own a commodities bro
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Economic history: mercantilism and international trade

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All too often during poor economic times many debunked economic fallacies of the past get reinvented. The reason is simple: a search for ideas and solutions alternative to the "mainstream" (however we define it) allows those who succumb to these fallacies to repeat the ancient errors classical economics was hoping to get rid of. The short-termism of politics plays a crucial role in the process of persistent perpetuation of such fallacies. This is why in times like these it is essential to go back in economic history and debunk some of the ideas that tend to surface repeatedly. In the following couple of posts, I attempt to do just that.  Misunderstanding trade  One of the most misunderstood areas of economics is international trade. More precisely, the idea that if we were to boost net exports - by subsidizing exports and constraining imports - we can achieve higher GDP growth. If one looks at the simple arithmetic of a standard Keynesian macro model: Y=C+I+G+NX, the
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Rent-seeking explained: Removing barriers to entry in the taxi market

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The taxi market is undoubtedly one of the best examples of something economists like to call rent-seeking . What does this phenomenon stand for and why do economists (particularly political economists) devote a lot of attention to it?  The classical definition was given by Gordon Tullock back in his  1967  seminal paper "The welfare cost of tariffs, monopolies and theft" , even though the phrase itself was coined by Anne Krueger in 1974 .  Rent-seeking is a process of gaining private benefits through the political process (by lobbying or logrolling for example). It implies gaining protection for a certain privileged group, which in return promises political support, large campaign contributions, or even bribes. This protection varies from giving a monopoly status to a certain company, regulating market entry than hampers competition (such as introducing licences to specific occupations), imposing tariffs to import goods to protect the domestic industry, handing out su
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Graphs (images) of the week: Separated by a border

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Usually comparing countries or regions requires looking at GDP growth data, GDP per capita, living standards, relative income or even the happiness index. But even a simple areal glimpse at the borders separating two systems can be more than enough to conclude which country is richer, healthier, more educated and on average more prosperous. It tells us that the causes of between-country differences have to be more than just climate, geography, culture or mentality. Particularly when the same nation is separated by nothing more than a border depicting the striking differences in political systems of the two countries (a classical example here are East and West Germany, but an equally good example can be North or South Korea).  As a result I found that the following set of images paint a better  picture  on between-country differences   than any existing data on global inequality.  The first one is from a  blog post I encountered on the Why Nations Fail blog, comparing the citi
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