In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of...

We consider redistributional taxation between people with and without human capital if education is endogenous and if individuals differ in their perceptions about own ability. Those who see their ability as low like redistributive taxation because of the transfers it generates. Those who see...

Die von Gale und Shapley in ihrem 1962 veröffentlichten Artikel College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage vorgestellte deferred acceptance procedure hat in der Literatur zu einer umfassenden Diskussion über Zuordnungsverfahren auf zweiseitigen Märkten geführt, die sich mit der...

This paper analyzes the role of narrowly selfish and other-regarding preferences for the median voter in a Meltzer-Richard (1981) framework. We use computerized and real human co-players to distinguish between these sets of motivations. Redistribution to real co-players has a negative effect on...

We investigate redistributive taxation in a political economy experiment and determine how different patterns of social mobility affect the choices of redistributional taxes. In the absence of social mobility, voters choose tax rates that are very well in line with the prediction derived in the...

Seit Jahren hat das dezentrale System der Hochschulzulassung in Deutschland aufgrund von Mehrfachzulassungen bis lange nach Semesterbeginn mit dem Problem unbesetzter Studienplätze zu kämpfen eines der typischen Probleme dezentraler Zuordnungsverfahren. Langwierige Nachrückverfahren...

Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central...

This paper explores situations where tenants in public houses, in a specific neighborhood, are given the legislated right to buy the houses they live in or can choose to remain in their houses and pay the regulated rent. This type of legislation has been passed in many European countries in the...

This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so, we eliminate a potential source of bias in...