Any cooperation that profits from relation-specific investments suffers from the well-known hold-up problem. If investments are not enforceable by an outside authority, the gains fall prey to individual opportunism caused by a free-rider problem. If, in addition, individual investments exhibit...

Having a child out of wedlock used to be associated with shame and scorn. This is mostly not the case any more in the western world. Therefore, freed from social sanctions, single motherhood has become an additional family-choice alternative for women, along with marriage and childlessness. Yet,...

Numerous (high-tax) countries presume that multinational firms use their transferpricing policies to shift profits into countries with lower tax rates. To avoid the corresponding loss in tax revenues, tax authorities develop constantly tightening rules to curb transfer-price distortions....

Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the...

Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the...

How to ban the fraudulent use of performance-enhancing drugs is an issue in all professional - and increasingly in amateur - sports. The main effort in enforcing a "clean sport" has concentrated on proving an abuse of performance-enhancing drugs and on imposing sanctions on teams and athletes....

Conventional wisdom has it that economic training and education tends to produce less cooperative people - where cooperation means following group-oriented goals. This issue has attracted particular attention in discussions of the current economic crisis where it was asked if increasing...

Classical household theory predicts that adolescents facing a developed labour market should invest in formal education. In contrast, it is obvious that adolescents in subsistence economies should choose learning-by-doing approaches to working on the family farm. However, it is unclear what...