This is the second out of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. This paper arranges the contesting parties into a 'spectrum' that reflects the spatial proximity of their policy profiles. The latter are...

This is the third of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. Currently, only China has a parliament larger than the German Bundestag, which still grows due to the increasing number of overhang mandates. The...

This is the last of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. It is shown that the policy representation by the Bundestag could be improved using the alternative Third Vote election method. Under the Third...

We study a voting model with incomplete information in which the evaluation of social welfare must be based on information about agents' top choices plus general qualitative background conditions on preferences. The former is elicited individually, while the latter is not. We apply this "frugal...

We study the effect on the participation rate of employing different voting rules in the context of the problem to allocate a fixed monetary budget to two different public projects. Specifically, we compare the mean rule according to which the average of the individually proposed allocations is...

Communication targeting households and firms has become a stand-alone policy tool of many central banks. But which forms of communication, if any, can reach ordinary people and manage their economic expectations effectively? In a large-scale randomized control trial, we show that communication...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that US industrial firms invest heavily in noncash, risky financial assets. Using hand-collected data on financial portfolios of German firms, we show that risky asset holdings are not an anomaly unique to the US. We find that industrial firms in Germany invest...

Binding lower bounds on interest rates and large government deficits limit the scope of fiscal and monetary policies to stimulate households' spending through financial intermediaries and firms. Policymakers have thus been implementing unconventional policies that aim to increase households'...

Willingness to vaccinate and test are critical in the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the effects of two measures to increase vaccination and testing: "choice architecture" and monetary compensations. Choice architecture has the goal of "nudging" people into a socially desired direction without...

Several recent surveys ask for a person's subjective probabilities that the in ation rate falls into various outcome ranges. We provide a new measure of the uncertainty implicit in such probabilities. The measure has several advantages over existing methods: It is robust, trivial to implement,...