This paper examines the effects of campaign spending limits on political competition and incumbency advantage. We study a reform in Brazil that imposed limits on campaign spending for mayoral elections. These limits were implemented with a discontinuous kink which we exploit for causal...

Bundesgesundheitsminister Rösler hat für 2011 eine umfassende Pflegereform sowohl der Leistungsseite als auch der Einnahmenstruktur angekündigt. Die Autoren dieses Beitrags machen den Vorschlag, die umlagefinanzierte Pflegeversicherung um eine kapitalgedeckte Säule zu ergänzen.

Cooperation among savings and cooperative banks was criticized by the European Commission because of potentially anti-competitive effects. In an industrial economics model of banks taking deposits and giving loans we look at regional demarcation as one of such cooperative practices. There are...

Over the course of the past twenty years, venture capital has fuelled an entrepreneurial revolution - first in the United States and now in Europe's common market -, which has opened new opportunities for technological innovation, capital investment and employment growth. Some of the most...

Given the marked reduction in the number of banks in Germany during recent years, the study estimates competitive behavior in the German banking system by applying an empirical method developed by Panzar and Rosse (1987). By estimating the banks' reduced form revenue functions, the sums of their...