Anchoring vignettes are commonly used to study and correct for differential item functioning and response bias in subjective survey questions. Self-assessed health status is a leading example. A crucial assumption of the vignette methodology is ’vignette equivalence’: The health status of...

The Annual Congress of the German Economic Association has become one of the largest national meetings of professional economists. The papers contributed at the Congress undergo a rigorous and competitive selection procedure where only about one half of all submissions are accepted for...

Using data from U.S. commodity flow survey, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between U.S. states by about 13%. The finding is robust over econometric models, survey waves, or aggregation levels. Including contemporaneous controls, such as network...

We consider a monopolistic supplier’s optimal choice of wholesale tariffs when downstream firms are privately informed about their retail costs. Under discriminatory pricing, downstream firms that differ in their ex ante distribution of retail costs are offered different tariffs. Under uniform...

We set up a simple two-country model of tax competition where firms with different productivity decide in which location to produce and sell output. In this model, a unique, asymmetric Nash equilibrium is shown to exist, provided that countries are sufficiently different with respect to their...

We propose a unified growth theory to investigate the mechanics generating the economic and demographic transition, and the role of mortality differences for comparative development. The framework can replicate the quantitative patterns in historical time series data and in contemporaneous...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic and welfare effects of an anticipated future switch from destination- to origin-based commodity taxation. We set up an intertemporal representative-agent model of an open economy and study especially consumption, investment, and trade-balance responses...

We develop an insurance market model where consumers (i) exhibit present-biased preferences, and (ii) suffer from physical pain in case of (health-) damage. They can exert preventive effort to reduce the probability of damage. Sophisticated consumers correctly anticipate their effort and...