Die geplante materielle Privatisierung der Deutschen Bahn AG kann als logischer Schritt der formalen Bahnprivatisierung vom 1.1.1994 angesehen werden. Welche Privatisierungsmodelle werden gegenwärtig diskutiert? Sollte die Deutsche Bahn AG mit oder ohne ihr Betriebsnetz an die Börse gehen? Ist...

We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public-good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of coalition-proofness and robustness, as well as individual incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public-good provision can only depend on...

The paper gives an overview over issues concerning the role of financial stability in monetary policy. Historically, financial stability has figured highly among central banks´ objectives, with policy measures ranging from interest rate stabilization to serving as a lender of the last resort....

McAfee and Reny (1992) have given a necessary and sufficient condition for full surplus extraction in models with a continuum of types. We interpret their condition as significantly stronger version of the requirement of injectiveness of the function mapping abstract types into beliefs and prove...

In a large economy, a first-best provison rule for a public good is robustly implementable with budget balance because no one individual alone can affect the aggregate outcome. First-best outcomes can, however, be blocked by coalitions of agents acting in concert. With a requirement of immunity...

Der Aufsatz diskutiert die Rolle der Wirtschaftswissenschaft in der politischen oder juristischen Diskussion über den Umgang mit ökonomischen Sachverhalten und Zusammenhängen. Die Künstlichkeit der in theoretischen Modellen oder Laborexperimenten untersuchten Welten wirft die Frage nach dem...

Shareholder-creditor conflicts can create leverage ratchet effects, resulting in inefficient capital structures. Once debt is in place, shareholders may inefficiently increase leverage but avoid reducing it no matter how beneficial leverage reduction might be to total firm value. We present...

The paper develops a technique for studying incentive problems with unidimensional hidden characteristics. The technique supports a unified approach, which can be applied regardless of whether the type set is finite, the type distribution has a continuous density, or the type distribution has...

The paper discusses the respective roles of competition policy and sector-specific regulation for industries such as telecommunications, electricity, and gas, in which network infrastructures that are natural monopolies serve as essential facilities for anybody who wants to provide services in...

This report argues in favour of an economics-based approach to Article 82, in a way similar to the reform of Article 81 and merger control. In particular, we support an effects-based rather than a form-based approach to competition policy. Such an approach focuses on the presence of...