Seit Jahren hat das dezentrale System der Hochschulzulassung in Deutschland aufgrund von Mehrfachzulassungen bis lange nach Semesterbeginn mit dem Problem unbesetzter Studienplätze zu kämpfen eines der typischen Probleme dezentraler Zuordnungsverfahren. Langwierige Nachrückverfahren...

Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central...

In this paper, we employ a public choice perspective to analyze the development of policies for renewable energy sources (RES) in the EU in general and in Germany more specifically. In doing so, we explain the main characteristics of current RES policies in the EU by reference to the...

We study the political determinants of policy experimentation during the US welfare reform. Among other changes, this reform shifted the autonomy to implement welfare policies from the federal government to the individual states. In line the predictions from a political agency model, we find...

Urban policy visibly molds city shape. This paper's interest is in how city shape (less visibly) molds urban policy. The paper finds: A sufficiently skewed city will look after its center. That is, the more skewed a city's shape towards the city periphery, the more likely an urban majority...

We consider a model of redistributive politics in which politicians have the possibility to raise some debt and to implement a pie-increasing reform, i.e. a reform creating a net increase in the total taxable endowment. The reform benefits occur in the future and the reform costs have to be paid...

States want their people to follow the law. They can either persuade them, sanction law-breakers, or both. But sanctions do not only alter people s perception of risks and costs; they also affect how people view their state and its legitimacy, unleashing a series of non-economic factors that...

Why do parties offer environmental policies in their political programs? While a number of papers examine the determinants of citizens' pro-environmental behaviour, we know little about the extent to which political parties adjust their platform towards environmentalism. We investigate this...

We study the political economy of policy innovations during the U.S. welfare reform in 1996. Specifically, we investigate how reputation concerns among governors influence the decision to experiment with welfare policies. In line with a political agency model, our empirical results suggest that...

A sizeable literature studies whether governments strategically interact with each other through policy-diffusion, learning, fiscal and yardstick competition. This paper asks whether, in the presence of direct democratic institutions, spatial interactions additionally result from voters' direct...