This paper explores, both formally and empirically, the political accountability mechanisms that lie behind the varying levels of public corruption and of effective governance taking place across nations. The first section develops a principal-agent model in which good governance is a function...

Most nations spend a considerable part of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. However, no previous study has addressed the productivity and efficiency of the core area of the armed forces, operational units, using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Introducing a model for the production...

Das Umlage- und das Kapitaldeckungsverfahren werden verglichen. Das Kapitaldeckungsverfahren hat eine größere Rendite für den einzelnen und bringt gesamtwirtschaftliche Effizienzgewinne mit sich: Es wird mehr Kapital gebildet, und Verzerrungen am Arbeitsmarkt werden beseitigt. Bei einem...

Nach einer Verordnung der EU-Kommission vom Dezember letzten Jahres müssen im Euro-Raum die Gebühren ab dem 1. Juli 2002 für grenzüberschreitende Abhebungen am Geldautomat und für Bankkartenzahlungen sowie ab dem 1. Juli 2003 bei Überweisungen denen im Inland entsprechen. Hiermit will die...

This paper develops a new analytical approach to the old question whether market conditions may influence the internal efficiency of firms. The basic textbook model of the firm is slightly extended to incorporate managers' incentives to reduce production costs in an imperfectly competitive...

Can income equality be combined with high economic efficiency and rapid economic growth? Fortunately, we need not to answer such a general question. Indeed, the question is poorly phrased. The relationship between income and wealth distribution, on one hand, and efficiency/growth, on the other,...

The purpose of this report is to contribute to the analysis of two questions. Should a merger control system take into account efficiency gains from horizontal mergers, and balance these gains against the anti-competitive effects of mergers? If so, how should a system be designed to account for...

Although there is a vast theoretical literature on the existence of a tradeoff between equity and efficiency, empirical investigations often fail to find evidence for this proposition. Furthermore there are hints that some social models in Europe can cope better with this trade-off and are...

Every finite noncooperative game can be presented as a weighted network congestion game, and also as a network congestion game with player-specific costs. In the first presentation, different players may contribute differently to congestion, and in the second, they are differently (negatively)...