Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

This is the first study that analyzes whether budget balance expectations are anchored and whether budget balance rules effectively anchor expectations. To this end, we use a unique data set which covers budget balance expectations in 17 countries that implemented a budget balance rules. While...

The paper empirically analyzes whether electoral rules make legislators differently responsive to changes in fiscal incentives. Key to the analysis are two unique reforms in the German state of Lower Saxony which changed (i) the municipal charter by replacing the council-manager system...

We allow a contest organizer to bias a contest in a discriminatory way; i.e., she can favor specific contestants by designing the contest rule in order to maximize total equilibrium effort (resp. revenue). The two predominant contest regimes are considered, all-pay auctions and lottery contests....

We analyze the effects of wage floors on optimal job design in a moral-hazard model with asymmetric tasks and imperfect aggregate performance measurement. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. A sufficiently high wage floor, however,...

This paper analyzes revenue and welfare effects of implementing a FAT both from a theoretical and a quantitative perspective. The theoretical analysis allows us to derive expressions for the revenue effects and the deadweight loss in a general equilibrium setting, which can be quantified with a...

In four studies (S1-S4; N = 320) we investigated whether moral hypocrisy (MH) is motivated by conscious impression management concerns or whether it is self-deceptive. In a dictator game, MH occurred both within participants (saying one thing, doing another; S1) and between participants (doing...

Since 2003/2004, German hospitals are reimbursed based on a prospective payment scheme (diagnosis related groups, DRGs). Patient classification in neonatology is based inter alia on birth weight, with substantial discontinuities in reimbursement at the relevant thresholds. These discontinuities...

We study the relationship between cyclical job and worker flows at the plant level using a new data set spanning from 1976-2006. We find that procyclical labor demand explains relatively little of procyclical worker flows. Instead, all plants in the employment growth distribution increase their...