Following the collapse of planning, new small and medium-sized firms rapidly emerged in all transition economies. Using firm level data, we investigate the interaction between the widespread opportunities for new business activities such firms faced and their business environment. The business...

This paper investigates whether a nation’s contingent value of hosting a mega-event depends on past experience with implied public goods benefits for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a...

The direct impact of local public goods on welfare is relatively easy to measure from land rents. However, the indirect effects on home and job location, on land use, and on agglomeration benefits are hard to pin down. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model for the valuation of these...

We study the trade-off between equity and growth in the context of tax-financed investment in public capital. Taking into account stylized facts on wealth accumulation, we model agent heterogeneity through differences in saving behavior, income source and time preference. In contrast to the...

Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...

This paper investigates the impact of fiscal policy on profits using panel data for 19 high-income OECD countries during the period 1975-1999. We estimate a profit equation in which profits depend on a set of fiscal variables. Our empirical method is based on a consistent treatment of the...

We study the impact of heterogeneous saving behavior on the distributional effects of public investment. A capital tax is levied to finance productive public capital in an economy with two types of households: high income households who save dynastically and middle income households who save for...

Financing productive public capital through distortionary taxes typically creates a trade-off: the optimal investment is determined as a compromise between efficiency-enhancing public investment and perturbing market efficiency, but is never socially optimal. In contrast, such a trade-off can...

Many decisions in politics and business are made by teams rather than by single individuals. In contrast, economic models typically assume an individual rational decision maker. A rapidly growing body of (experimental) literature investigates team decisions in different settings. We study team...