This lecture discusses the 2010 crisis of the European Monetary Union and draws some lessons for reform. Crisis resolution has been difficult because the sovereign debt crisis of countries like Greece and Portugal has come together with real-estate and banking crises in countries like Ireland...

This paper yields a rationale for why subsidized public banks may be desirable from a regional perspective in a financially integrated economy. We present a model with credit rationing and heterogeneous regions in which public banks prevent a capital drain from poorer to richer regions by...

Customary law has been criticized from very different angles. Rational choice theorists claim that what looks like custom is nothing but self-interest. Positivists doubt that anything beyond consent assumes the force of law. In this paper, we adopt an experimental approach to test these claims....

We propose a new approach to the normative analysis of public-good provision. In addition to individual incentive compatibility, we impose conditions of robust implementability and coalition proofness. Under these additional conditions, participants' contributions can only depend on the level of...

Laboratory experiments by Fudenberg and Pathak (2010), and Vyrastekova, Funaki and Takeuch (2008) show that punishment is able to sustain cooperation in groups even when it is observed only in the end of the interaction sequence. Our results demonstrate that the real power of unobserved...

The paper, based on a historic account of the theory of representation in German legal thought, seeks to understand what effect particracy has on democratic representation and thereby links a discourse dating back to the days of the Weimar Republic to the analytical approach to the political...

The novel part of this paper is a model of the principle of proportionality, as the cornerstone of the doctrine of fundamental rights. German law, and with some modifications also the law of the European Community and the European Convention on Human Rights, do not categorically outlaw...

From the angle of competition policy, Voice over IP looks like a panacea. It not only brings better service, but it also increases competitive pressure on former telecommunications monopolists. This paper points to the largely overlooked downside. In a pure world of Internet telephony, there...

The most famous element in Bentham’s theory of punishment, the Panopticon Prison, expresses his view of the two purposes of punishment, deterrence and special prevention. This paper inves-tigates Bentham’s intuition in a public goods lab experiment, by manipulating how much infor-mation on...

We study whether a firm that produces and sells access to an excludable public good should face a self-financing requirement, or, alternatively, receive subsidies that help to cover the cost of public-goods provision. The main result is that the desirability of a self-financing requirement is...