This is the first study that assesses the economic effects of direct democratic institutions on a cross country basis. Its results are based on up to six new measures produced to reflect the legislative basis for using direct democratic institutions as well as their factual use. In addition, a...

Should a redistributive government optimally subsidize education to provoke a reduction in the skill premium through general equilibrium effects on wages? To answer this question, this paper studies optimal linear and non-linear redistributive income taxes and education subsidies in two-type...

This paper bolsters Prescott's (2004) claim that high taxes are responsible for lacklustre labor market performance in continental European countries. We develop a lifecycle model with endogenous skill formation, endogenous labor supply, and endogenous retirement. Labor taxation distorts not...

We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information.

Germany's social security system is surveyed, its benefits and contributions are discussed. The expansion of this system in the last decades is described, its impact on employment and growth is studied and proposals for the reform of the system are discussed.

The economic effects of federalism are unclear: some papers find that federalism has strong positive effects on a number of economically relevant variables, others find negative effects. The results often crucially hinge upon the proxies for federalism used. In this paper, we critically survey...

The relevance of political risk to international trade and investment remains a topic of continuing interest. However, summary measures of political risk, including country corruption, do not give consistent results. In this paper, we bring together two recent streams of literature to highlight...

Although the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been ratified in global and national forums, they have not yet been incorporated into operational planning within governments or international organizations. The weak link between the policies and the investments needed for their...

The UN Millennium Project identified a set of Quick Impact Initiatives (QIIs) for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to the Millennium Project, QIIs are interventions to be implemented in the early years of an MDG scale-up strategy that generate rapid results. With...

This paper aims at the provision of applicable recommendations for institutions and actors involved regarding the EMU accession process both in CEE and in the euro-zone. In order to provide topical advice, the first part, on markets, will concentrate on theory and empirics of labour markets,...