We consider an economy with two groups of individuals, rich and poor. A central authority can either directly redistribute income to the poor, or allow for some degree of informality in economic activities by not enforcing property rights. The optimal degree of informality depends upon the...

It is commonly believed that the possibility to sue privately for antitrust damages decreases the number of type II errors in enforcement at the cost of creating more type I errors. We extend the analysis by taking into account the fact that private parties often submit evidence during public...

Third parties such as trade associations often assist cartels by collecting and evaluating market behaviour at the firm level. Under incomplete information neutral market oversight helps to distinguish defecting from complying behaviour, increasing the effectiveness of punishments for defectors...

This paper demonstrates that increasing the expected sanctions for a crime may increase this crime's prevalence, using a principal-agent model with different crimes. The intuition is that the policy change may increase the principal's expected payoff from crime by decreasing the information rent...

Do incentives and policy choices of public officials depend on whether they are appointed by an elected body or directly elected by voters? I investigate this question using the example of state grants for highly visible municipal investment projects. To attract these grants, mayors must prepare...

This paper develops a stochastic dynamic politico-economic model of sovereign debt to analyze the interaction of sovereign default risk and political turnover. Two parties differ in their preferred size of public spending which is financed by taxes and external debt. Electoral outcomes are...

In intergroup contests a manager advises and motivates her group’s members. Her rewards often depend on the subsequent contest expenditure of the members. I test whether such incentives undermine the credibility and effectiveness of a manager’s efforts. In the different experimental...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and the composition of public expenditures. First, I derive a theoretical model that links the degree of corruption in a country - to be understood as the prevailing culture of corruption - to distortions in the budget composition. The...

This paper considers the players' behaviour in an asymmetric two-player contest. When do they decide to "struggle" and when to "subjugate"? Analysing contest-success functions it is found that two crucial prerequisites for "struggle" or "war" have to be met. Thus, such an equilibrium is possible...

Traditional political economy models of taxation fail to explain why there is so little redistribution of wealth despite significant wealth inequalites. This is for two reasons: (1) The median voter approach cannot deal with a multidimensional policy-space and (2) wealth taxation affects...