Our very simple model serves to illustrate that it is useful to think of corruption as implicit privatisation cum auction, i.e. of the state relegating decision-making authority to a private person, who then auctions the rents off.

It is the prevailing approach in the public choice literature to model lobbying and corruption in the same manner. On the contrary, we attempt to capture both in the same framework (auction theory), but using different modelling approaches. We present a unified framework in which some...

This paper surveys the nexus between tax competition and the fiscal constitution. We distinguish various approaches to competition between jurisdictions and provide a critique of evolutionary approaches to 'systems competition'. In the main part of the paper, a simple model of horizontal tax...

Using a new panel dataset comprising publication and appointment data for 889 German academic economists over a quarter of a century, we confirm the familiar hypothesis that publications are important for professorial appointments, but find only a small negative effect of appointments on...

This paper compares student evaluation of teaching on the web site MeinProf.de to the standard evaluation procedures at German universities. While MeinProf offers the advantage of a broad, publicly available database, a number of theoretical and econometric problems emerge. Many of these...

We consider an argument that it might be helpful to combat poverty in developing countries indirectly by enlisting firms' help (as corporate citizens) in reducing corruption. It turns out that this argument crucially depends on a fair number of presmises, including (a) a common interest of firms...

We take issue with the argument expounded, among others, by Layard (2006, Economic Journal) that status-seeking preferences justify heavier taxation of income because this serves to internalise the negative externality that the pursuit of status imposes on others. In a model where status depends...

Der Beitrag vermittelt einem wissenschaftlich gebildeten Publikum diesseits der medienüblichen Virologinnen den Mechanismus epidemiologischer Modelle. Daneben wird die Politik in einem epidemiologischen Standardmodell endogenisiert und die zentrale Hypothese anhand von RKI-Daten überprüft. Es...