We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with two regions and two separated labor markets. Households dffer in their financial endowment and their children's ability. Non-students are immobile. Students decide where to study; they return home after graduation with exogenous...

The paper empirically analyzes whether electoral rules make legislators differently responsive to changes in fiscal incentives. Key to the analysis are two unique reforms in the German state of Lower Saxony which changed (i) the municipal charter by replacing the council-manager system...

We allow a contest organizer to bias a contest in a discriminatory way; i.e., she can favor specific contestants by designing the contest rule in order to maximize total equilibrium effort (resp. revenue). The two predominant contest regimes are considered, all-pay auctions and lottery contests....

In using their citizen candidate framework, Besley and Coate (2001) fi nd that if citizen candidates with sufficiently extreme preferences are available, lobbying has no in fluence on equilibrium policy. I show that this result does not hold in a model with ideological parties instead of citizen...

This paper investigates the effects of different prize structures on the effort choices of participants in two-stage elimination contests. A format with a single prize is shown to maximize total effort over both stages, but induces low effort in stage 1 and high effort in stage 2. By contrast, a...

The generic alliance game considers players in an alliance who fight against an external enemy. After victory, the alliance may break up, and its members fight against each other about the spoils of the victory. Our experimental analysis of this game shows: In-group solidarity vanishes after the...

In this paper, citizens vote in order to influence the election outcome and in order to signal their unobserved characteristics to others. The model is one of rational voting and generates the following predictions: (i) The paradox of not voting does not arise, because the benefit of voting does...

One explanation of the recent real estate bubble might point to homeowners' artificially restricting housing supply. While empirical work has not found unequivocal evidence in support of this hypothesis, homeowners may well be restricting supply nonetheless, and without this restriction...

In this paper incumbency effects in Federal Elections and Mayoral Elections in Germany are estimated using a quasi-experimental design which allows for causal inference under a set of rather mild assumptions. Relying on nonparametric and parametric estimation procedures and exploiting a recently...

We analyze the effects of personal characteristics of 4239 political candidates on their performance in local elections in Germany. Our results show that a candidate's occupation plays a decisive role. Occupational effects can be explained by (a) an occupation's public reputation and (b) public...