The study of policy discourse comprises actor-centered and content-oriented approaches. We attempt to close the gap between the two kinds of approaches by introducing a new methodology for the analysis of political discourse called Discourse Network Analysis. It is based on social network...

Most insurance companies publish few data on the occurrence and detection of insurance fraud. This stands in contrast to the previous literature on costly state verification, which has shown that it is optimal to commit to an auditing strategy, as the credible announcement of thoroughly auditing...

Public good provision is often local and also affects bystanders. Is provision harder if contributions harm bystanders, and is provision easier if outsiders gain a windfall profit? In an experiment we observe that both positive and negative externalities reduce provision levels whenever actors...

The nonexistence of equilibria in models of electoral competition involving multiple issues is one of the more puzzling results in political economics. In this paper, we relax the standard assumption that parties act as expected utility maximizers. We show that equilibria often exist when...

Disclosure of information triggers immediate price movements, but it mitigates price movements at a later date, when the information would otherwise have become public. Consequently, disclosure shifts risk from later cohorts of investors to earlier cohorts. Hence, disclosure policy can be...

Does probation pay a double dividend? Society saves the cost of incarceration, and convicts preserve their liberty. But does probation also reduce the risk of recidivism? In a meta-study we show that the field evidence is inconclusive. Moreover it struggles with an identification problem: those...

We study the optimal observability of the tax base within the standard linear income tax problem, where observability is determined by the government’s investment into the accurate measurement of the tax base. We characterize the optimal level of observability and derive a new expression for...

This contribution seeks to shed new light onto the classification of legal orders with respect to the domestic effect of international law. Traditional theory distinguishes between monist and dualist systems, those that accept the primacy of international law over domestic law, and those that do...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

The realization of market transactions often depends on decisions in groups in which members are anonymous and cannot communicate, but have interrelated outcomes. In a comprehensive study, we investigated the interaction of group effects, strategic effects and endowment effects in different...