A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it also generates impacts that are worth understanding from a societal, historical, and cultural perspective.In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spreads, we are able to harness a valuable key resource,...

Broadening democracy by lowering the voting age is on the political agenda in many democratic societies. Previous suffrage extensions suggest that there are systematic differences between what parliaments decide and what voters want with respect to enfranchisement of new groups. This paper...

Die Institution eines einzelnen CEO (Chief Executive Officer) hat erhebliche Schwächen. Der CEO hat andere Interessen als die Eigentümer und deren Vertreter sowie die anderen Topmanager. Einer einzelnen Person so viel Macht zuzuweisen ist riskant. Der Wechsel eines CEO verursacht hohe Kosten....

Democratic elections look very much like a contest where voters have to compare the candidates according to an ordinal ranking. Nevertheless, the theory of tournaments has not yet been applied to Political Economics. Therefore, we deploy tournament models to analyse elections. The main...

In the economic literature various political institutions designed to control the government have been analyzed. However, an important institution has been neglected so far: independent auditing institutions with an extended mandate to analyze the budget draft and individual policy proposals. We...

Who is the best formula 1 driver? Until today it was impossible to answer this question because the observable performance of a driver depends both on his talent and the quality of his cars. In this paper we for the first time separate driver talent from car quality by econometrically analyzing...

Rational individuals know that present government debts transform into higher future taxes. The Ricardian equivalence implies that the burden of the debt is not shifted between generations because of compensating intergenerational transfers. While the assumptions for Ricardian equivalence to...

Scholars today are under increasing pressure to publish in A-journals, the main role of which consists in certifying that a paper meets traditional academic standards. Consequences of this pressure are multiple authorship, slicing of ideas and incentives to deviate from the truth. The...

Public debts capitalize into property prices. Therefore, property owners tend to favor tax over debt financing for government spending. In contrast, tenants do not suffer from debt capitalization. Thus, they tend to favor debt over tax financing. Our model of the resulting democratic fight...

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for the majority's preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis by matching voting behavior on legislative proposals...