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...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

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...

Economic research suggests that investments in early education are generally more successful than investments at later ages. This paper presents a representative survey experiment on education spending in Germany, which exhibits low relative public spending on early education. Results are...

Higher education finance depends on the public's preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the...

We show that the electorate's preferences for using tuition to finance higher education strongly depend on the design of the payment scheme. In representative surveys of the German electorate (N18,000), experimentally replacing regular upfront by deferred income-contingent payments increases...

The ifo Education Survey is a representative opinion survey of the German voting-age population on education topics that has been conducted annually since 2014. It covers public preferences on a wide range of education policy issues ranging from early childhood education, schools, and...

Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

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...