Given the intensive and ideologically charged debate over the use of private contractors for publicly funded services, it is somewhat surprising that many social scientists have preferred to explain government outsourcing by the pursuit of economic efficiency. Starting out from different...

Um den deutschen Arbeitsmarkt demografiefest zu machen, bedarf es einer stärkeren Aktivierung des Potenzials weiblicher Erwerbspersonen bei gleichzeitiger Steigerung der Geburtenrate. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt Handlungsoptionen zur Lösung dieser beiden zentralen Zukunftsaufgaben auf und...

When policymakers and private agents use models, the economists who design the model have an incentive to alter it in order to influence outcomes in a fashion consistent with their own preferences. I discuss some consequences of the existence of such ideological bias. In particular, I analyze...

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...

Previous studies report a wide range of estimates for how female labor supply responds to childcare prices. We shed new light on this question using a reform that raised the prices of public daycare. Parents respond by reducing public daycare and increasing childcare at home. Parents also reduce...