A challenging question in moral philosophy is how to gauge the achievement of equity between individuals when people differ in their preferences, and in particular where some people might have “expensive tastes”, in that the goods necessary to bring them to a certain level of welfare are...

Based on static partial equilibrium analysis, the "new brain drain" literature argues that, by raising the return to education, a brain drain generates a brain gain that is, under certain conditions, larger than the brain drain itself, and that such a net brain gain results in an increase in...

This paper studies the design of optimal utilitarian mechanisms for an excludable public good. Excludability provides a basis for making people pay for admissions; the payments can be used for redistribution and/or funding. Whereas previous work assumed that admissions are governed by the...

We use a public referendum on a new air traffic concept in Berlin, Germany as a natural experiment to analyze how the interaction of tenure and capitalization effects shapes the outcome of direct democracy processes. We distinguish between homevoters, i.e., voters who are homeowners, and...

Climate is a persistent asset, bar none: changes in climate-related stocks have consequences spanning over centuries or possibly millennia to the future. To reconcile the discounting of such far-distant impacts and realism of the shorter-term decisions, we consider hyperbolic time-preferences in...

We consider a sequential game in which one player produces a public good and the other player can influence this decision by making an unconditional transfer. An efficient allocation requires the Lindahl property: the sum of the two (implicit) individual prices has to be equal to the resource...

We develop a model for museum visits and estimate it on a large sample of holders of a museum card that provides free access to all museums. Our model distinguishes two stages, referring to the determination of the number of trips and destination choice and can deal with an effect of income on...