In this paper we reply to Binmore and Shaked’s criticism of the Fehr-Schmidt model of inequity aversion. We put the theory and their arguments into perspective and show that their criticism is not substantiated. Finally, we briefly comment on the main challenges for future research on...

The quantity theory is disjunct to the hard core of general equilibrium theory. It does not relate to the formal foundations of standard economics and, vice versa, from the behavioral axioms of standard economics a rationale for using money cannot be derived. The present paper leaves the...

The equalization of profit rates as the outcome of free competition is one of the oldest tenets in theoretical economics. Being intuitively convincing its premises and implications, though, are not well defined. As Walras put it: ‘To state a theory is one thing; to prove it is another.’...

The core problem of economics is that the representative economist never managed to keep political and theoretical economics properly apart. The mixture is toxic indeed. As Joan Robinson said about what parades as economics: Scrap the lot and start again. Yet, the question then arises where to...

In this paper we give an overview, with special emphasis on Germany, of the recent development of the market for venture capital. We analyse the financial contracting problems that arise when entrepreneurs need capital from outside investors, and demonstrate how these problems are addressed by...

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...

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...

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 evaluate the incentives for strategic commodity tax-setting under destination and origin regimes when competition is imperfect and commodity taxes must be used to finance the government budget. Different cases of international duopoly are compared, where firms compete over quantities or...