Randomized experiments are often viewed as the "gold standard" of scientific evidence but people's scepticism towards experiments has compromised their viability in the past. We study preferences for experimental policy evaluations in a representative survey in Germany (N1,900). We find that a...

Das Ziel der vorliegenden Studie besteht in der Rekonstruktion und Analyse von Digitalisierungsdiskursen, die auf 2018 und 2019 besuchten Tagungen zu sozialen Dienstleistungen, Ehrenamt und ländlicher Entwicklung beobachtet wurden. Auf Tagungen geben Akteurinnen und Akteure ihrem...

Der Staat steht angesichts der Transformation von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft durch die Digitalisierung, die Globalisierung und den Klimawandel vor neuen und großen Herausforderungen. Diesen wird er am besten gerecht, wenn er Probleme präventiv behandelt und nicht ex post "heilt". Um die...

A common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision of education for equalisation of opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop a framework in which the tax and education...

Die Europäische Union wurde zu Beginn des neuen institutionellen Zyklus, als es mit der programmatischen Ausrichtung losgehen sollte, von der COVID-19-Pandemie ausgebremst. Das Wahlergebnis zum Europaparlament hatte die Befürchtungen, Europaskepsis würde zum Signum der kommenden Periode,...

India has the world's biggest and arguably most aggressive employment-based affirmative action policy for minorities. This paper exploits the institutional features of a federally mandated employment quota policy to examine its causal impact on the economic lives of the two distinct minority...

Do democracies discriminate less against minorities as compared to non-democracies? How does the dominance of an ethnic group affect discrimination under various political regimes? We build a theory which tries to answer such questions. In our model, political leaders (democratically elected or...

This paper studies the effects of the high-speed internet expansion on the match quality of new hires. They combine data on internet availability at the local level with German individual register and vacancy data. Results show that internet availability has no major impact on the stability of...

This paper critically surveys the growing literature on the policy choices of local governments. First, we identify various reasons for local government policy interactions, including fiscal competition, bidding for firms, yardstick competition, expenditure spillovers, and Tiebout sorting. We...

This paper compares some of the most common and debated ways of financing the provision of impure public goods/services in a unified dynamic general equilibrium framework. We study and rank a wide variety of ways ranging from provision without any user charges, to provision with full user...