This article investigates the impact of societal structure on behavior in competitions that can be modeled as all-pay auctions with identity-dependent externalities. The consideration of identity-dependent externalities, which naturally arise in the most common applications of all-pay auctions,...

To save Americaindeed, the global economy as a wholethe private/public sector balance has to shift, and the neoliberal economic model on which the country has been based for the past 25 years has to be modified. The role of the state needs to be reemphasized. The abandonment of a mixed economy...

This paper addresses two basic issues related to technological innovation and climate stabilisation objectives: i) Can innovation policies be effective in stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations? ii) To what extent can innovation policies complement carbon pricing (taxes or permit trading) and...

Using a sample of OECD countries, this paper finds that while fiscal rules succeeded in reducing total government expenditures and budget deficits in the medium term, they significantly affected the composition of government expenditure: the ratio of social transfers to government consumption...

Using longitudinal data from the Ukraine we examine the extent of any long-lasting effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce. The variation in the local area level of radiation fallout from the Chernobyl accident...

When moving from a plurality rule to a proportional system, members of national parliament have more incentives to diverge from the median voter's preferences. We match voting behavior concerning legislative proposals of Swiss members of parliament with real referenda outcomes on the same issues...

Public debts capitalize into property prices. This so far neglected fact has important consequences for the tax vs. debt choice. Property owners suffer more from the debt burden and, thus, have a stronger preference for tax financing of government spending than tenants. As a consequence of the...

We use a panel of 21 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009 to investigate the effects of different fiscal adjustment strategies on long-term interest rates - a key fiscal indicator reflecting the costs of government debt service. A government confronted with high deficits and rising debt will sooner...

We employ bootstrap methods (Efron (1979)) to test the effect of an important electoral reform implemented in Italy from 1993 to 2001, that moved the system for electing the Par-liament from purely proportional to plurality rule (for 75% of the seats). We do not find any effect on either the...

An expected utility model is used to analyze the allocation decision of an incumbent politician in dividing public funds between expenditures on public goods and pure rents. Comparative statics analysis reveals that while the result for improvements in transparency is ambiguous in terms of...