In analyzing economic policies, a severe problem is the time-inconsistency problem. In this regard, the choice of commitment vs. discretion engenders a tradeoff of flexibility and credibility. Therefore, it might be necessary and acceptable to adopt a discretionary policy to some degree, but...

This paper specifically examines intergenerational conflict and analyzes an overlapping generations model of public goods provision from the viewpoint of time-consistency. Public goods are financed through labor-income and capital-income taxation, thereby distorting savings and the labor supply....

We discuss the origins of the Greek financial crisis as manifested in the growing fiscal and current-account deficits since euro-area entry in 2001. We then provide an investigation of spreads on Greek relative to German long-term government debt. Using monthly data over the period 2000 to 2010,...

This paper studies a Tiebout model with two school districts, housing markets and peer effects to re-evaluate the optimality properties of the allocation of households to districts induced by head and income taxes. The main novel results reveal that head taxes are not superior to income taxes...

We build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity/child quality trade-off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital. By integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous...

Classic financial agency theory recommends compensation through stock options rather than shares to induce risk neutrality in otherwise risk averse agents. In an experiment, we find that subjects acting as executives do also take risks that are excessive from the perspective of shareholders if...

We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing...

We study the make-or-buy decision of oligopolistic firms in an industry in which final good production requires specialised inputs. Firms’ mode of operation decision depends on both the incentive to economize on costs and on strategic considerations. We explore the strategic incentives to...

Regression-based decomposition procedures are used to both standardise the concentration index and to determine the contribution of inequalities in the individual health determinants to the overall value of the index. The main contribution of this paper is to develop analogous procedures to...

Fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas) are low-entropy natural resources which seem to be indispensable for our economic prosperity. This paper investigates the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and economic growth in Japan, using a multivariate model of fossil fuels, non-fossil energy, labor...