The purpose of this paper is to critically review the past four decades of empirical research on the relationship between internal migration and regional variation in the generosity of Canada’s unemployment insurance system. It has long been argued that because the Canadian insurance system is...

Does the supply of a welfare state create its own demand? Many economic scholars studying welfare arrangements refer to Say’s law and insinuate a self-destructive welfare state. However, little is known about the empirical validity of these assumptions and hypotheses. We study the dynamic...

This paper investigates the impact of the intensity of political competition on the leviathan behavior by political incumbents. Using panel data from German municipalities, we test whether the relative political strength of parties in local councils influences the spending behavior of...

This paper questions the widely applied parallelism of demographic and economic development in characterizing urban shrinkage in Germany, and argues that the usage of population change as a single indicator leads to incorrect policy recommendations for combating urban shrinkage. As the cases of...

This paper derives and justifies a procedurally fair bidding mechanism and reviews experiments that apply the mechanism to public projects provision. In the experiments, not all parties benefit from provision, and the projects’ costs can be negative. The experimental results indicate that the...

This paper analyzes the impact of college enrollment expansion on student academic achievements and labor market outcomes in the context of competition among colleges. When public policies promote “access” to college education, colleges adjust their curricula: Less selective public colleges...

We study the dynamics of the quantity and quality of teachers in the framework of dynamic general equilibrium OLG model. The quantity and quality are jointly set by a government agency wishing to maximize the quality of basic education per student while being bound by teachers’ collective...

The paper provides a comparative analysis of the association between student achievement and public-private partnerships (PPPs) in schooling across countries. Student-level data from the PISA international achievement test provides information on the public-private character of both operation...

This paper introduces money into an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth. The model, due to Docquier et al. (2007), exhibits a positive intergenerational externality which precludes its laissez-fair equilibrium to be optimal even if the government can control the level of...

We analyse how institutional and political decisions are intertwined. Citizens who differ in their mobility and ability vote first on labour market integration and afterwards on education policy. The institutional decision on integration influences the succeeding education policy. More...