Economists generally assume that the state has sufffcient institutional capacityto support markets and levy taxes, assumptions which cannot be taken forgranted in many states, neither historcally nor in today’s developing world.Our paper develops a framework where "policy choices" in market...

Recent developments in voting theory show that Condorcet profiles embedded in electoratesare responsible for conflicts between pairwise voting methods and for reversals ofrankings under positional methods whenever candidates are dropped or added. Because ofthe strong symmetry of the rankings of...

I conduct an experiment to assess whether majority voting on a nonbindingsharing norm affects subsequent behavior in a dictator game. Ina baseline treatment, subjects play a one shot dictator game. In a votingtreatment, subjects are first placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and vote onthe...

Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company’s business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of...

We establish the precise connections between progressive taxation andinequality reduction, in a setting where the level of tax revenue to be raised isendogenously fixed and tax schemes are balanced. We show that, in contrastwith the traditional literature on taxation, the equivalence between...

The focus of the paper is on the remuneration of executives of large European banks. We describe the pay-for-performance sensitivity of the compensation and its disclosure as two dimensions of the board remuneration systems in the European countries.

The relationship between executive pay and corporate financial performance con-tinues to attract wide academic, media and policy attention. The very high salariesenjoyed by senior executives in corporations primarily in the North American coun-tries are often contrasted with the relatively low...

Globalisierung und Deregulierung bringen den Unternehmen in vielerlei Hinsichtneue Möglichkeiten, ihr wirtschaftliches Handeln zu optimieren. Aber sowie durch diesen schnellen Wandel und die steigende Komplexität von Geschäftenmehr Optionen entstehen, werden auch immer mehr neuartige...