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...

A main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to enable disadvantaged groups to compete with their privileged counterparts. Existing theoretical and empirical research documents that incorporating AA can result in both more egalitarian outcomes and higher exerted efforts. However, the...

We propose that false beliefs about the own current economic status are an important factor for explaining populist attitudes. Along with the subjects' receptiveness to right-wing populism, we elicit their perceived relative income positions in a representative survey of German households. We...

We propose to strengthen Popper's notion of falsifiability by adding the requirement that when an observation is inconsistent with a theory, there must be a short proof of this inconsistency. We model the concept of a short proof using tools from computational complexity, and provide some...

We study a theoretical general equilibrium environment in which the only activity of interest is armed robbery. Agents choose whether to be citizens or robbers, and whether to purchase handguns. Armed citizens can protect themselves from robbery but any armed agent runs the risk of accidentally...

We analyze a client's choice of contract in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for routine cases. The distinguishing feature here is that lawyers may submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer: an hourly rate, a fixed fee or a mixed fee, which is a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly...

Outsourcing may have several impacts in Brazilian labor market, especially for workers. That's why it is relevant to debate new regulations for this phenomenon, mainly legislative ones. The Bill no 4.330/2004 is one of the regulations that have been discussed in the Brazilian parliament. But...

We analyze vertical structures where a regulated network operator serves n network users, and the network users compete in quantities for customers. We distinguish two cases: (i) none of the network users are related to the network operator (ownership unbundling), (ii) one of the network users...

We consider a single object allocation problem with multidimensional signals and interdependent valuations. When agents signals are statistically independent, Jehiel and Moldovanu show that efficient and Bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms generally do not exist. In this paper, we extend...

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...