The main purpose of this introductory chapter is to be briefly review the ongoing debate in the field of sustainability and economic growth. First we provide an introduction to current empirical research. Results of empirical analyses as well as methodological problems concerning the analysis of...

We modify the principal-agent model with moral hazard by assuming that the agent is expectation-based loss averse according to K o szegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The optimal contract is a binary payment scheme even for a rich performance measure, where standard preferences predict a fully...

We set up a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms to study the interaction between wage bargaining and foreign direct investment. Thereby, we highlight the incentives of firms to invest abroad in order to improve their bargaining position vis-á-vis local unions and we show how...

Based on Baumol’s cost-disease model, we develop two alternativemeasures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Bothproductivity measures are based on changes in the relative price ofschooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schoolinghas increased faster in 1970-94...

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...