The principle of subsidiarity has become more widely known with its prominent adoption in the Maastricht Treaty. The principle is, however, deeply embedded in the history of political economy, notably in the continental European tradition. In this tradition, it has the status of a principle in...

Perhaps, the 1990''''s will be the decade of constitution writing. With many European States gaining their independence or reshaping their contours, new constitutions will be drawn up. Recent advances in the economic analysis of law can help to make this difficult task more feasible. This essay...

In a single framework, I address the question of the informational basis for evaluating social states. I particularly focus on information about individual welfare, individual preferences and individual (moral) judgments, but the model is also open to any other informational input deemed...

In this paper, we study the crime reducing potential of education, presenting causal statistical estimates based upon a law that changed the compulsory school leaving age in England and Wales. We frame the analysis in a regression-discontinuity setting and uncover significant decreases in...

We study the implications of procedural fairness on income taxation. We formulateprocedural fairness as a particular non-cooperative bargaining game and examine thestationary subgame perfect equilibria of the game. The equilibrium outcome is called tax equilibrium and is shown to be unique. The...

We characterize all preference profiles at which the approval (voting) rule is manipulable, under three extensions of preferences to sets of alternatives: by comparison of worstalternatives, best alternatives, or by comparison based on stochastic dominance. We perform a similar exercise for...

This survey focuses on experimental labor markets investigating two aspects that deem us importantfor a better understanding of labor market relations and the consequences for labor marketpolicies. The first part of the survey is dedicated to papers that assess the prevalence ofreciprocal...

In this paper we experimentally investigate whether partial coercion can in combination withconditional cooperation increase contributions to a public good. We are especially interested inthe behavior of the non-coerced populations. The main finding is that in our setting conditionalcooperation...

Economic and social interaction takes place between individuals with heterogeneous characteristics. We investigate experimentally the emergence and informal enforcement of different contribution norms to a public good in homogeneous and different heterogeneous groups. When punishment is not...

We argue that rules and rule-following provide a key means of solving social dilemmas by revealinginformation about individual willingness to cooperate, thereby facilitating assortative matchingand the exclusion of non-cooperative types. Rules impose costs on prospective entrants to anygroup and...