We investigate yardstick competition between local jurisdictions in which pure rent-seeking incumbents undertake an identical infrastructure project choosing be- tween two contractual arrangements with different financing profiles, namely traditional procurement (TP) and public-private...

We consider a public-private partnership in an infrastructure project, which requires specialised expertise during the construction stage for the infrastructure to operationalise. This entails that, after an investment is made to begin building the infrastructure, its construction is completed...

The paper analyses the effects of the monetary policy crisis management of the European Central Bank on the economic order of Germany. It is argued that in post-war Europe the German social market economy as designed by Eucken (1952) and Müller-Armack (1966) has been a core element of growth,...

The paper analyses the impact of Japanese monetary policy crisis management on the Japanese banking sector since the 1998 Japanese financial crisis. It shows how low-cost liquidity provision as a means to stabilize banks has created a growing gap between deposits above lending and has compressed...

We propose that crisis experience influences preferences towards COVID-19 vaccination and the speed of vaccination during the initial phase when vaccines became available. We use macro and micro data to empirically investigate our theory and introduce a novel crisis experience index. Evidence...

Understanding the effectiveness of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19 is crucial to justify economically costly social distancing measures. We present a case study focusing on the three Scandinavian countries. Whereas Denmark and Norway imposed relatively strict measures, Sweden follows...

Does the emigration of skilled individuals necessarily result in losses for source countries due to the brain drain? Combining industry-level patenting and migration data from 32 European countries, we show that emigration in fact positively contributes to innovation in source countries. We use...

The effects of performance pay in routine, easy to measure tasks are well-documented, but they are much less understood in knowledge creation. This paper studies the effects of explicit and implicit, career concerns incentives common in knowledge work in a multitasking model, and estimates their...

We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to show that areas with stronger social ties to two early COVID-19 "hotspots" (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally have more confirmed COVID-19 cases as of March 30, 2020. These relationships hold after...

COVID-19 abruptly impacted the labor market with the unemployment rate jumping to 14.7 percent less than two months after state governments began adopting social distancing measures. Unemployment of this magnitude has not been seen since the Great Depression. This paper provides the first study...