This article considers legal uncertainty in competition law. Contrary to perceived wisdom, I show that the uncertainty itself might have positive welfare effects, if it is sufficiently small. Legal uncertainty functions as a screening device provided that the threshold of legality is uncertain....

The study analyzes the impact of European antitrust enforcement on industry performance measured as competition intensity (Price Cost Margin) and productivity (labor productivity and distance to the frontier). For a panel of OECD countries on the industry level since 1988, we estimate the impact...

High public debt combined with low capacities of the state to raise taxes and to support markets can put even developed countries into turmoil. However, the existing political economy literature of state capacity, pioneered by Besley and Persson (2009), does not investigate the interaction of...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower competent politicians. In our model, candidates are privately informed about their abilities and are driven by office rents as well as...

Conventional wisdom has it that proportional representation leads to more coalition governments and so to greater government spending, especially in redistributive categories favoured by special-interest groups. In contrast, we show in a theoretical model that first-past-the-post systems of...

This paper shows that the abolition of state guarantees to publicly owned banks in Germany resulted in an increase in refinancing costs at German savings banks. Rather than being the result of increased market discipline, the increase in refinancing costs is shown to be driven by spillover...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

This is the first study that analyzes whether budget balance expectations are anchored and whether budget balance rules effectively anchor expectations. To this end, we use a unique data set which covers budget balance expectations in 17 countries that implemented a budget balance rules. While...

This paper investigates the effects of the deregulation of shop-opening hours legislation on retail employment in Germany. In 2006, the legislative competence was shifted from the federal to the state level, leading to a gradual deregulation of shop opening restrictions in most of Germany s...

We provide difference-in-differences evidence from Germany on the effect of deregulating weekday shop opening hours on employment in food retailing. Using data on the universe of German shops, we find that relaxing restrictions on business hours increased employment by 0.4 workers per shop...