This paper investigates how the heterogenous incomes and preferences of potential donors affect the timing of contribution decisions when it is endogenously determined by contributors themselves. More specifically, we use a simple setting with two donors, Cobb-Douglas preferences, and complete...

It is explored in this paper how – depending on the agents’ preferences – an unequal income distribution may lead to a higher public good supply in a non-cooperative Nash equilibrium than in a cooperative Lindahl equilibrium that arises from a balanced income distribution. The degree of...

This paper studies the design of the policy mix in a monetary union, that is, the institutional arrangement specifying the relationships between the various policymakers present in the union and the extent of their capacity of action. It is assumed that policymakers do not cooperate. Detailing...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

Country-specific business cycle fluctuations are potentially very costly for member states of currency unions because they lack monetary autonomy. The actual costs depend on the extent to which consumption is shielded from these fluctuations and thus on the extent of risk sharing across member...

The objective of this paper is to explain populist attitudes that are prevailing in a number of European democracies. Populist attitudes expectedly lead to social protests and populist votes. We capture the populist wave by relying not on voting behavior but rather on values that are...

What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that austerity increases tax progressivity. Consistent with this evidence, we find that in a...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...

We use a laboratory experiment to identify the impact of risk in the private and public dimensions of social investments. In variants of a public good game, we separate the return a subject’s investment generates for herself vs. the return to others. We find a detrimental effect of risk on...

Firms’ political donations can induce distortions in the allocation of public procurement contracts. In this article, we employ an advanced non-parametric efficiency model to study the public sector (cost) efficiency implications of such distortions. Using a unique dataset covering the Czech...