Der Föderalismuskommission ist es Ende letzten Jahres nicht gelungen, ein gemeinsames Reformkonzept vorzulegen. Welche Themen waren in der Diskussion? Woran scheiterte die Kommission? Welche Themenfelder sollten bei einer Wiederaufnahme der Gespräche bearbeitet werden?

Latin American economic development has been perceived as a puzzle. The region has trailed most other world regions over the past half century despite relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle, however, can be resolved by considering educational achievement, a...

Gegenwärtig wird eine Abschaffung bzw. Einschränkung der 620-DM-Beschäftigungsverhältnisse diskutiert. Dr. Clemens Fuest und Professor Bernd Huber analysieren die möglichen Auswirkungen für den Arbeitsmarkt und das Sozialsystem und schlagen alternativ eine beschäftigungsfreundliche Reform...

We present evidence from a laboratory experiment that individuals who feel having been treated unfairly in the interaction with others are more likely to cheat in a subsequent, unrelated game. We interpret this result as showing that the violation of a social norm (fairness) by others can be...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? Gabaix (2011) shows that idosyncratic shocks can have aggregate effects if the distribution of firm sizes in manufacturing follows a power law distribution. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we expand the theory of granularity...

We present a non-cooperative model of a family’s time allocation between work and a home-produced public good, and examine whether the income tax should apply to couples or individuals. While tax-induced labor supply distortions lead to overprovision of the public good, spouses’ failure to...

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls’ school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, thereby evoking a surge of building girls’ schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants...

Germany has one of the most generous public pension and health insurance systems of the world, yet private savings are high and remain positive until old age, even for most low income households. How can we explain what we might want to term the \"German savings puzzle\"? We provide a...