Politicians frequently emphasize the importance of Mittelstand firms for the economy, thereby parti- cularly referring to their enormous engagement in training apprentices. However, there is yet almost no empirical evidence on the question whether Mittelstand firms are in fact excessively active...

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Based on an extended version of a time-inconsistency model of monetary policy we show that the degree of effective monetary policy conservatism can be uncovered by studying to what extent central banks react to real disturbances. By estimating central bank reaction functions in moving and...

Eine Demokratische Reformkonzeption: Mehr Einfluss für die Bürger und mehr Fachkompetenz und Langfristigkeit bei politischen Entscheidungen

We show that, in a two-stage model of monetary policy with stochastic policy targets and asymmetric information, the transparency regime chosen by the central bank does never coincide with the regime preferred by society. Independent of society’s endogenous choice of delegation, the central...

Netzneutralität Soll die Neutralität des Internet staatlich reguliert werden?

In theoretical analyses on terrorism and the media, the structure of the media market has thus far been neglected. The present paper adopts a multi-sided market framework in order to explore the ways in which the markets for terrorism, advertising, and the media influence each other. Although...

Studies on EU enlargement mostly focus on its welfare-economic and much less so on its public-choice dimension. Yet, the latter may be as important as the former when it comes to sustain integration. This paper aims at filling the gap by exploring theoretically and empirically how enlargement of...

Although a large body of research has examined the effects of unions on the wage distribution, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the effects of unions on the distribution of income. This paper examines the long-run relationship between unionization and income inequality for a...

In international relations, short-run incentives for non-cooperation often dominate. Yet, (external) institutions for enforcing cooperation are hampered by national sovereignty, supposedly strengthening the role of selfenforcing mechanisms. This paper examines their scope with a focus on...