Die brandenburgische Landesregierung hat vor gut zehn Jahren begonnen, ihre Förderpolitiken neu auszurichten und räumlich auf "starke Standorte" (sog. Regionale Wachstumskerne) zu fokussieren. Die Wachstumskerne sind die brandenburgischen Standorte mit - im Landesmaßstab -...

Using a microeconomic model and data from the Establishment Panel of the German Institute for Employment Research, we analyze the optimal establishment size against the background of rent-seeking workers and the influence of works councils. The theoretical part shows that establishment size has...

Attorneys elected to the US House of Representatives and to US state legislatures are systematically less likely to vote in favor of tort reforms that restrict tort litigation, but more likely to support bills that extend tort law. This finding is based on the analysis of 54 votes at the federal...

This paper first formulates a model of how the politicians in a local government collectively lobby to raise intergovernmental grants to their local government. The model identifies a relationship between council size and grants received. I then study this relationship empirically using the...

Our theoretical model suggests that 'bureaucratisation' is a potential threat to future economic growth in the EU. The bureaucratic incentives to budget maximize leads to overwhelming pressure for new administrative tasks because bureaucracies are competing for resources just like fishermen or...

Incentive instruments like asset ownership and performance pay often have to strike a balance between the productive incentives and the rent-seeking incentives they provide. Standard theory predicts that a given instrument becomes less attractive when the effectiveness of rent-seeking activities...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

The ability to accurately evaluate an employee would seem to be a key activity in managing Information Technology (IT). Yet, workers may engage in dishonest and misleading behavior, which distort the evaluation, a variation of organizational politics. Why would they do so? One hypothesis is that...

We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing...

This paper analyzes the determinants of local institutions and distribution of political power within a constant ‘macro-institutional’ setting. We show that characteristics of Brazilian municipalities related to institutional quality and distribution of political power are partly inherited...