This paper provides a political-economy explanation of the degree of centralization in economic policy making. To determine which policies are to be centralized, regions select representatives who then negotiate the degree of centralization and the regional cost shares of centrally decided...

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians? incentives to behave opportunistically increase with...

The Shapley value of a cooperative transferable utility game distributes the dividend of each coalition in the game equally among its members. Given exogenous weights for all players, the corresponding weighted Shapley value distributes the dividends proportionally to their weights. In this...

In this paper we experimentally test skewness seeking at the individual level. Several prospects that can be ordered with respect to the third-degree stochastic dominance (3SD) criterion are ranked by the participants of the experiment. We ¯nd that the skewness of a distribution has a...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the size of an economic union and the degree of policy centralization. We consider a political economy setting in which elected representatives bargain about the degree of centralization within the union. In our model strategic delegation affects the...

Recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate steps which can be ranked according to the cost savings from producing abroad. We replace this assumption by the notion of a technologically determined sequence of production steps....

In a second best environment, the optimal policy choice sometimes follows the first best rules. This note lays down the information structure and separability assumptions under which this property holds in a variety of setups.

The theoretical effects of labour regulations such as employment protection legislation (EPL) on innovation is ambiguous, and empirical evidence has thus far been inconclusive. EPL increases job security and the greater enforceability of job contracts may increase worker investment in innovative...

This paper reviews some of the econometric methods that have been used in the economics of education. The focus is on understanding how the assumptions made to justify and implement such methods relate to the underlying economic model and the interpretation of the results. We start by...