Es ist eine weitverbreitete Wahrnehmung, dass die Politik vergleichsweise schlecht funktio-niert, das heisst nur unbefriedigende Ergebnisse hervorbringt. Politiker und Parteien haben eine geringe Wertschätzung in der Gesellschaft. Dies gilt sowohl für die Bürger als auch für viele Experten...

Mancur Olson's theory of the decline of nations is path-breaking in political economics. It has been tested cross-sectionally in numerous empirical studies. We survey the existing results briefly, with a special focus on studies using the number of lobbies as an exogenous variable. Using data...

Starting from the secular fact of an increasing governmentś share, a retrospective on Adolph Wagnerś writings seems worthwhile. A leading German economist of the Bismarck era, he first formulated the famous law of increasing state activityʺ for industrializing nations. After analyzing his way...

This paper compares student evaluation of teaching on the web site MeinProf.de to the standard evaluation procedures at German universities. While MeinProf offers the advantage of a broad, publicly available database, a number of theoretical and econometric problems emerge. Many of these...

Considering the sector bias of International Outsourcing within a 2x2 framework, four different scenarios appear. Each industry can either relocate its high or its low skill intensive production fragment. Traditionally, depending on the superiority of a wage vs. an outsourcing-effect, general...

As a result of the prevailing governance structure, economic policy in democracies usually suffers from specific deficiencies. Among these are the predominance of distributive over efficiency objectives, the neglect of long-run effects, and the lack of or biased use of expert knowledge in the...