Stefanie Gäbler prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy. The study was completed in March 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of six distinct empirical essays...

This paper presents the first empirical investigation into the effect of e-shopping on subjective well-being. The analysis relies on a nationally and regionally representative dataset from Italy (n = 4,130) drawn from the 2008 wave of the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) carried out...

This paper presents a model of the firm that includes the possibility of firm and employee-on-the-job decision making based on alternatives to profit and utility maximization. Such alternatives are relevant and significant when explaining firm activity in cultural environments in which self...

The quasi-exogenous division of the French regions Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco- Prussian War allows us to provide evidence about group identity formation within historically homogeneous regions. We use several measures of stated and revealed preferences at the municipal-level in a...

How the Executive builds its own legislative agenda and which role does the Presidency play? This article partially answers the two questions and specifies how the formulation and the division of labor among its members - parties, bureaucracies, the Presidency and the President - are structured....

This article analyzes paths and patterns of partisan appointments among sector-categories in the executive branch of Brazil from 1986 to 2016. The analysis sought to understand nuances of partisan appointments for ministries in different periods taking into consideration different presidential...

Distributions of language rights in multilingual settings are analyzed from a normative viewpoint in this chapter. If the cost structure of providing rights is concave in the number of beneficiaries, then a critical-mass criterion for the determination of an optimal rights structure results. It...

We examine the relationship between inheritance rules and voter turnout. Inheritance rules are measured by entailed farms in South Tyrol: land properties whose inheritance is regulated by a law similar to the right of primogeniture. Using data for municipalities between 1998 and 2010, we show...

In this paper, we explore the effects of dialectal diversity on economic performance by drawing evidence from Chinese prefecture-level cities. Our dataset is a panel of 5-year average data over the period from 2001 to 2015 including 274 cities. We compute five indices of Chinese dialectal...

University students represent nearly more than half of the youth population (age group of 15-24) in Turkey. Meanwhile, the latest demographic data shows that they will constitute a majority of the elder generation in the context of the recent rapid aging trend in the near future. That said, and...