Studying evolutionarily successful behavior we show in a general framework that when individuals maximizing payoff differentials invest resources in punishing others. Interestingly, these investments are increasing in individuals, own wealth and decreasing in the wealth of others.

In this paper, we abandon the stylized median voter and study (i) how distributional tensions can act in many different ways depending on social affinity and on the prospect of upward or downwardmobility of the different income classes, (ii) income distribution dynamics, intergenerational...

When people decide about saving and consumption across the various periods of their life time they take into account their life expectancy when comparing present and future needs and resources for satisfying them. The experimental design, applied at two sites (Humboldt-University at Berlin and...

The experimental situation presents a complex stochastic intertemporal allocation problem. First, two initial chance moves select one of three possible termination probabilities which then determines whether "life" lasts 3,4,5, or 6 periods. Compared to Anderhub et al. (1997) participants are...

East-West migration in Germany peaked at the beginning of the 90s although the average wage gap between Eastern and Western Germany continues to average about 25%. We analyze the propensity to migrate using microdata from the German Socioeconomic Panel. Fitting a parametric Generalized Linear...

We show in the paper that the decomposition proposed by Beveridge and Nelson (1981) for models that are integrated of order one can be generalized to seasonal Arima models by means of a partial fraction decomposition. Two equivalent algorithms are proposed to optimally (in the mean squared...