Wirtschaftspolitische Entscheidungen sollten durch eine sorgfältige Beratung vorbereitet und begleitet werden. Kompetente Beratung seitens der unabhängigen Wissenschaft ist nötig, um einen nachhaltigen Politikansatz zu fördern und tendenziell kurzatmigen Lösungsversuchen entgegen zu wirken....

This paper argues that currently advanced, aging economies experienced a qualitative change in the role of public education during the process of industrialization. In the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, public education was regarded as a duty that regulated child labor and thereby...

This paper studies allocation correspondences in the house allocation problems with collective initial endowments. We examine the implications of two axioms, namely 'consistency' and 'unanimity.' Consistency requires the allocation correspondence be invariant under reductions of population....

We present identification and estimation results for the collective model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices, censoring of hours and nonparticipation in employment. We derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied by...

In a step-level public-good experiment, we investigate how the order of moves (simultaneous vs. sequential) and the number of step levels (one vs. two) affects public-good provision in a two-player game. We find that the sequential order of moves significantly improves public-good provision and...

We study the opportunistic political budget cycle in the London Metropolitan Boroughs between 1902 and 1937 under two different suffrage regimes: taxpayer suffrage (1902-1914) and universal suffrage (1921-1937). We argue and find supporting evidence that the political budget cycle operates...

It is noted that modern economics cannot decide which economic system is the best way of organizing production. In particular, support is given to Nelson (1981) who claims that modern economics does not provide any substantial argument in favor of private enterprise being the best. However,...

The characteristics of endogenously determined sharing rules and the group-size paradox are studied in a model of group contest with the following features: (i) The prize has mixed privatepublic good characteristics. (ii) Groups can differ in marginal cost of effort and their membership size....

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on...