Feed-in tariffs under the Renewable Energy Sources Act, the so-called Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG), have triggered a massive expansion of electricity from renewable energy sources in Germany over the last decade. The increase in non-competitive renewable power generation though went hand in...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...

Rather than about absolute payoffs, governments in fiscal competition often seem to care about their performance relative to other governments. Moreover, they often appear to mimic policies observed elsewhere. We study such behaviour in a tax competition game with mobile capital à la...

This paper provides a method for the analysis of the spatial and temporal diffusion of shocks in a dynamic system. We use changes in real house prices within the UK economy at the level of regions to illustrate its use. Adjustment to shocks involves both a region specific and a spatial effect....

Do gender differences matter for politicians' budgetary behaviour when confronted with an exogenous change in the institutional framework? After the 2013 Spanish municipal reform, municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants were no longer responsible for managing the provision of social...

Do gender differences matter for politicians’ budgetary behaviour when confronted with an exogenous change in the institutional framework? After the 2013 Spanish municipal reform, municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants were no longer responsible for managing the provision of social...

The Coordination Reform was introduced in Norway in 2012 including a fee for bed-blocking in hospitals. To study this, we introduce a Stackelberg game where the hospital is the leader and the care institution is the follower. The reform does not necessarily lead to less bed-blocking as this...

How do patient and provider incentives affect mode and cost of long-term care? Our analysis of 1 million nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their stays instead of transitioning to community-based care due to limited cost-sharing. Second,...

This paper examines the long-term impacts of growth and development monitoring in early childhood. For this purpose, we evaluate a pediatric healthcare program, the Systematic Management of Children (SMC), which offers growth and development monitoring through routine health checkups for all...

Schools have been very central in the debate about COVID-19. On one hand, there have been many supporters of the argument to keep them open, for their importance for the youngsters, and for the effort many countries played in establishing protocols to keep them safe. On the other hand, a...