This article analyzes the efficiency in the provision of child care services at the municipal level and identifies the main determinants of inefficiency. We use a unique data set on the local child care expenditures in the eastern German State of Saxony. The analysis is performed in two stages....

Gutachten im Auftrag des Sächsischen Staatsministeriums der Finanzen. <br>Die kreisangehörigen Gemeinden, Kreisfreien Städte und Landkreise im Freistaat Sachsen müssen die Ausgaben, die bei der Erfüllung eigener sowie ihnen übertragener Aufgaben entstehen, selbst tragen. Dazu erhalten sie...

Gegenstand des vorliegenden Beitrages sind die Anreizeffekte des Länderfinanzausgleichs. In methodischer Hinsicht basieren die Analysen auf einem theoretischen Modell des Staatsverhaltens sowie ökonometrischen Paneldatenmodellen. Untersucht werden dabei die Anreizeffekte des...

Gegenstand der Studie ist die Ausgestaltung des deutschen Fiskalföderalismus. Es soll gezeigt werden, in welchem Umfang das Konzept des föderalen Wettbewerbs für die bundesdeutsche Finanzverfassung nutzbar gemacht werden kann. Diese Fragestellung umfasst das Verhältnis zwischen Bund und...

We analyze costly information acquisition and information revelation in groups in a dynamic setting. Even when group members have perfectly aligned interests the group may inefficiently delay decisions. When deadlines are far away, uninformed group members freeride on each others' efforts to...

Incentives to invest in higher education are affected by both the direct wage effect of human capital investments and the indirect wage effect resulting from lower unemployment risks and shorter spells in unemployment associated with higher educated. We analyse the returns to education in...

Political economy factors tend to induce many governments to spend on private goods (non-social subsidies) to the detriment of spending on social and public goods. We show that this bias in spending patterns is particularly costly for economic growth when capital markets are imperfect. We thus...

Political survey data for nine West European countries show that women have become increasingly left-wing compared to men, and that this trend is positively correlated with the decline in marriage in these countries. This pattern is mirrored in German longitudinal data (GSOEP), where transitions...

The governments of nearly all countries are major providers of primary and secondary education to their citizens. In some countries, however, public schools coexist with private schools, while in others the government is the sole provider of education. In this study, we ask why different...

This paper suggests that human capital externalities are important in determining whether goods and services should be privately or publicly provided. We study situations where that the cost incurred by an individual provider for providing quality is affected by the human capital of her...