Many Western countries face the challenge of reconciling future labor demand with growing public opposition to immigration. The dynamics and underlying processes of setting immigration requirements remain unclear as research so far mainly focuses on context-specific empirical studies. We use a...

This paper reviews some of the economic experimental evidence on conformism. There is nothing to match the early psychology experiments where subjects were often swayed by the behaviour of others to an extraordinary degree, but there is plenty of evidence of conformism. This seems built-in to...

There is a substantial literature examining coordination in public goods games. We conducted an experiment to explore how varying patterns of thresholds affect the willingness of subjects to contribute to a public good. We had subjects play a multiperiod game where each subject was allocated an...

The Central East European economies are competing for international investment capital, especially for FDI in order to support transformation. The paper explores how the Siemens AG, one of the world's largest MNCs, allocates investments towards and within Central East Europe and how they fit...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...

This paper provides a rationale for the coexistence of different systems of corporate governance based on the multitude of agency problems typically to be governed within a given firm. Because there are complementarity and substitution relationships between governance instruments, specific...

Donations by migrants to community projects in their home countries (“collective remittances”) help to provide local public goods and may promote economic development. We draw on the literatures on migrant remittances and on philanthropy in general to identify possible motives for collective...

The proposal involves the establishment of ?welfare accounts? for every person in a country. There are to be four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

In this paper, the authors analyze the behavior of local governments on capital taxation when the financial choices in terms of a public good quality are done by a central planner. More specifically, they ask the question whether a local government has an interest to tax the mobile factor in...

This paper deals with the influence of factor mobility on local infrastructure policy and rent-seeking activities of local interest groups. It employs a model where households differ with respect to their endowment with the immobile factor land. Local governments decide about the level of...