This research probes the voting behavior of the Congressional Border Caucus in the U.S. House after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. These attacks raised the consciousness of Congress, the media, and the public about the U.S-Mexico border and put the policy interests of the Border Caucus in the national spotlight. After the attacks, did caucus members adhere more closely to caucus positions that were important to border districts or more regularly vote against them? House votes on border and non-border amendments before and after the terrorist attacks are examined to determine if caucus members rallied to support the caucus majority on votes important to the border region after the attacks, or if factors such as party and ideology were more important influences on their votes. The findings reveal that Caucus members were indeed more supportive of border-related House amendments than non-Caucus members after the attacks. Yet, party and ideology still played a significant role in determining the votes of caucus and non-caucus members.

The Purchasing Power Standard (PPS) is widely used for economic analyses, studies and strategic documents in the European Union. Although it is a necessity to take the purchasing power i.e. price level into consideration the state of art of PPS is not usable at regional level. The current PPS is not reflecting regional prices but is based on one country price level. This might lead to serious imperfections and misspecifications especially in relation to regionally oriented policies like the Cohesion Policy. Using PPS for analyzing convergence reveals quite puzzling conclusions which are supporting this possible problem of PPS. It is vital for the EU policies to become efficient to compute new regional price levels or to substantially modify current PPS.

We analyze whether biodiversity is increasing the receipts of tourism and thus is beneficial for developing countries (DCs).The underlying assumption is that a rich biodiversity provides a comparative advantage for most DCs.We use a simple trade theory framework.The model is supported by an empirical analysis.The main findings are that first DCs, being abundant of biodiversity, seem to have a comparative advantage in (sustainable) tourism, that second incidence of birds as the probably best explored taxonomic group has a positive impact on inbound tourism receipts per capita, and that third the rate of endangered to total birds is negatively influencing tourism receipts.We draw some cautious policy conclusions.

In this paper we use new statistical methods to examine the connection between economic expectations and support for the government in the U.S.A. For this purpose, we analyse the order of integration for Congressional Approval and Economic Expectations from a fractional point of view. The results show that though both individual series can be specified in terms of fractional processes, the unit root cannot statistically be rejected, which is consistent with other em- pirical works in these variables. The possibility of cointegration is also examined from a fractional viewpoint, and the re- sults strongly reject the hypothesis of cointegration. Thus, both series are nonstationary, and there is no linkage between them in the long run, according to an error correction equilibrium relationship. Over the last 15 years, the number of papers dealing with economics and government support has dramatically in- creased. Methodologically, there have been important ad- vances, and there are now many time series available for different countries along with extensive public opinion polls. However, modelling time series in political science is a mat- ter that still remains controversial. Thus, while some authors argue that most series are stationary around a deterministic trend, others assume that political time series are difference- stationary, that is, they contain a unit root. However, these two types of models (I(0) stationarity around a linear trend and I(1) or unit roots) are extremely specialised members of a wider class of processes, called fractionally integrated or I(d) processes. In this article we adopt the latter approach and assume that d can be a real value. In doing so, we allow for a much richer degree of flexibility in the dynamic behav- iour of the series, not achieved when using these two classic representations.