This paper studies the effect of policy uncertainty on the formation of new activities in Romer's (1994) type of an economy, where productivity of labor increases with the number of capital goods. Adding a new capital good requires a capital specific set-up cost, invested prior to using the...

Economic policy is modeled as the outcome of a (political) game between two interest groups. The possible ex-post (realized) outcomes in the game correspond to the proposed policies. In the literature the policies fought for are exogenous. We extend such games by allowing the endogenous...

This paper sheds light on the political economy of local energy politics both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. A case study of a small town in Southern Germany (Schönau) is presented, where environmentalists have won the political contest against the regional energy monopolist...

We introduce learning by doing in a dynamic contest. Contestants compete in an early round and can use the experience gained to reduce effort cost in a subsequent contest. A contest designer can decide how much of the prize mass to distribute in the early contest and how much to leave for the...