We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...

This paper addresses the question of how firms react to tax incentives in a formula apportionment (FA) tax regime. Under FA, profits of all consolidated entities of a business group are summed and then allocated according to a formula based on FA factors. We hypothesize that firms may change the...

Several countries have recently introduced national capital standards exceeding the internationally coordinated Basel III rules, which is inconsistent with the 'race to the bottom' in capital standards found in the literature. We study regulatory competition when banks are heterogeneous and give...

We study management practices and performance in a representative sample of German municipalities, which provide the bulk of direct administrative services for citizens and firms in Germany. Surveyed municipalities differ substantially in their use of structured management practices, and this...

Adaptation is omnipresent but people systematically fail to correctly anticipate the degree to which they adapt. This leads individuals to make inefficient intertemporal decisions. This paper concerns optimal income taxation to correct for such anticipation-biases in a framework where consumers...

This paper empirically investigates the effect of interbank relationship lending on banks’ access to liquidity. Our analysis is based on German interbank payment data which we use to create a panel of unsecured overnight loans between 1079 distinct borrower-lender pairs. The data shows that...

When firms trade forward contracts with banks to protect foreign currency cash flows against exchange rate movements, foreign exchange risk migrates to the banking sector. We show how this migrated risk may induce systemic repercussions with severe implications for the real economy. For...

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...

How much information should governments reveal to consumers if consumption choices have uninternalized consequences to society? How does an alternative tax policy compare to information disclosure? We develop a price theoretic model of information design that allows empiricists to identify the...

We consider a single object allocation problem with multidimensional signals and interdependent valuations. When agents' signals are statistically independent, Jehiel and Moldovanu [Efficient design with interdependent valuations, Econometrica, 69(5):1237-1259, 2001] show that efficient and...