A closer look at the developments in 35 cities across China, looking for potential regional real estate bubbles. An assessment is done about the success of the various policies and their potential negative impact on the economy and the financial system.

The authors contend that the costs of the euro in Germany outweigh the benefits. How they determine this is interesting and controversial. But this point of view deserves a hearing.

Strengthening elements of direct democracy has become a hotly debated issue especially in purely representative democracies where distrust in political institutions and policymakers has been continually growing in recent years. We develop a compensation model of interest groups seeking a...

No abstract available.

In this paper, we examine students' attitudes towards various allocation mechanisms for a scarce resource. For this purpose, we have run a survey among officers of the German military who are enrolled in different courses of study (such as economics) at the University of the German Federal Armed...

The demographic trends in Germany will seriously impact supply and demand for public infrastructure. Significant savings for the public budgets are not expected, though. There might plausibly be fewer com-muters in an ageing and shrinking society. But as road freight transport is likely to...

Die Größenstruktur der deutschen Städte folgt so wie in vielen anderen Ländern einer strengen Gesetzmäßigkeit: dem Zipfschen Gesetz. Es gibt starke Hinweise, dass dieses Zipfsche Gesetz nicht nur auf nationaler Ebene gilt, sondern auch auf der Ebene von Bundesländern und teilweise sogar...

Economists praise the efficiency of the price mechanism in allocating scarce resources. Others, however, often reject it as unfair. In this study, we investigate the extent to which economists also differ from non-economists in how they value the fairness of the price system, and examine how...