Social and/or political involvement within the population is often argued to enhance public sector performance. The underlying idea is that engagement fosters political awareness and interest and increases the public?s monitoring ability. Still, although extensive voter involvement may put...

German municipalities are expected to suffer from (often significant) population losses in the upcoming decades. We assess these local governments? vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of this demographic decline through two means (using a sample of 1021 municipalities in the state of...

We show that U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol is straightforward under political economy considerations. The reason is that U.S. compliance costs exceed low willingness to pay for dealing with global warming in the U.S. The withdrawal had a crucial impact on the concretion of the Protocol...

The viability of modern open science norms and practices depend on public disclosure of new knowledge, methods, and materials. Aggregate data from the OECD show a broad shift in the institutional financing structure that supports academic research from public to private sponsorship. This paper...

Universal child care that is available, affordable and of good quality is regarded as a key instrument of a country's social and labor market policy. As full public involvement in the provision of child care is costly, licensing non-public providers can enlarges parental choice and relieve...

In der aktuellen Debatte zur Rekommunalisierung von Stromanbietern wird häufig das Argument der sicheren Versorgung zu niedrigen Preisen von Vertretern öffentlicher Eigentümer angeführt. Während die sichere Belieferung mit Strom im Rahmen der Grundversorgung gesetzlich vorgeschrieben ist,...

The viability of modern open science norms and practices depend on public disclosure of new knowledge, methods, and materials. However, increasing industry funding of research can restrict the dissemination of results and materials. We show, through a survey sample of 837 German scientists in...

Institutional early childhood education and care can be funded and delivered in various ways relying on both the public and the private sector. The provision of childcare ranges from public operation to mixed markets with public and private providers to considerably marketised systems with...

We estimate the effects of R&D on firms' credit ratings and on financial distress. The main purpose is the comparison of firms in Western Germany and Eastern Germany as a transitional economy. Innovative activity has a positive impact on firm value proxied by ratings in Western Germany, but a...

In this paper, we analyse if individual inequality aversion measured with simple experimental games depends on whether the monetary endowment in these games is either a windfall gain ("house money") or a reward for a certain effort-related performance. Moreover, we analyse whether the way of...