Come on, this is not even a real law, and the data are really shaky to justify the title of this post. 5% significance threshold means that Luxembourg or Austria satisfy the criteroa. So what? The EU is a large political organization, not a NYSE index. The real trouble for greece is not the fake accession data (Italy had similarly manipulated data), but the squandering of public money that followed.

I get it, geeks love to play with empirical laws, but this paper is at best interesting trivia. I could go on analyzing what could really prevent the disaster forever ...