We use a novel approach to address the question of whether a union of sovereign countries can efficiently raise and allocate a budget, even when members are purely self-interested and participation is voluntary. The main innovation of our model is to explore the link between budget contributions...

Zwischen 2007 und 2012 haben wir die Lebensentwürfe und Lebensverläufe von jungen Frauen und Männern verfolgt. Heute sind die Befragten 21 bis 34 Jahre alt. Welche Einstellungen haben sie zu Familie, Arbeit und Leben? Wie haben sich ihre Hoffnungen, Träume und Pläne über die Zeit...

With the fall of the borders between (most of) the countries of the Common Market, the member countries of the EC have lost one of their most important instrument to control immigration: the control of their external borders. This fact combined with the increasing immigration pressure from...

The objective of this paper is to present different equity rules that can be applied to the initial allocation of greenhouse gas entitlements and to analyse the potential impacts of these rules EU-wide as well as on the level of member states. The methodological framework used in the empirical...

The paper investigates the business cycle relationships between the EU-15, the EU-11, as well as the EU-core countries for the period 1971 to 1997. Emphasis is put on the question whether there is a synchronization in the national business cycles or not. Using One-way- and Twoway-Anova...

This paper analyses annual, age-specific retirement rates in Germany between 1971 and 1991. The time-series data show significant changes in overall and age-specific retirement behavior over the 21 year period. The literature provides two alternative explanations for the observed developments:...

This paper evaluates the linkage between social security strategies and redistributive effects in EU social transfer systems. It is argued that the various European systems produce different patterns of redistribution that may be explained by the adoption of different mixes of social security...