Diermeier and Fong (2008a) recently proposed a legislative bargaining model with reconsideration in the context of a distributive policy environment. In this paper we prove general existence and necessary conditions for pure-strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space and...

This paper analyzes an ongoing bargaining situation in which preferences evolve over time and the previous agreement becomes the next status quo, determining the payoffs until a new agreement is reached. We show that the endogeneity of the status quo exacerbates the players' conflict of interest...

Can direct democracy provisions improve welfare over pure representative democracy? This paper studies how such provisions affect politicians' incentives and selection. While direct democracy allows citizens to correct politicians' mistakes, it also reduces the incentives of elected...

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

When making collektive desicions, principals (voters or districts) typically benefit by strategically delegating their bargaining and voting power to representatives different from themselves. There are conflicting views in the literature, however, of whether such a delegate should be...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

We study the allocation of German lawyers to regional courts for legal trainee-ships. Because of excess demand in some regions lawyers often have to wait before being allocated. The currently used \"Berlin\" mechanism is not weakly Pareto efficient, does not eliminate justified envy and does not...

The gap in university enrollment by parental education is large and persistent in many countries. In our representative survey, 74 percent of German university graduates, but only 36 percent of those without a university degree favor a university education for their children. The latter are more...

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students' religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing...

This paper aims to investigate the relation between inefficiency in the Brazilian education system and municipal wealth, discussing how the actual legislation possibly influences it. To that end, we apply a stochastic frontier model which accommodates covariates in the asymmetric error component...