Abstract: Improving child care and pre-school education is one of the challenging duties of public authorities in Germany. Given the public resources spent on nursery schools, the quantity as well as the quality of early childhood education in Germany is comparatively low. We think that...

We examine the impact of Bank of Canada communications and media reporting on them on Canadian (short- and medium-term) bond and stock market returns using a GARCH model. Communications are rather uniformly distributed over the sample period (1998-2006); however, media coverage is particularly...

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve consists of voting- and non-voting members. Apart from deciding about interest rate policy, members individually formulate regular inflation forecasts. This paper uncovers systematic differences in individual inflation forecasts...

We present an economic experiment on the impact of social information on voter behaviour and find strong support for bandwagon behaviour in voting decisions. In total, 418 subjects participated in the experiment. Bandwagon behaviour is found among both male and female subjects.

This paper analyzes how population aging affects immigration policy in rich industrialized countries. It sets up a two-period model of a representative democracy with two overlapping generations. The government's preferred immigration rate increases with the share of retirees in the population....

The Condorcet Jury Theorem is derived from the implicit assumption that jury members only commit one type of error. If the probability of this error is smaller than 0.5, then group decisions are better than those of individual members. In binary decision situations, however, two types of error...

We introduce heterogeneity into a monetary policy committee by allowing the degree of model uncertainty to differ across members. It is shown that in this framework the stage at which members reach consensus matters. An aggregation protocol under which members only average policy deemed optimal...

A one-sector model of endogenous growth based on the accumulation of real capital by saving/investing and accumulation of human capital via learning-by-doing is presented. Experience is measured by means of production output aggregated over time. Explicitly separating learning and real capital...

This paper explores empirically how the adoption of IMF programs affects sovereign risk over the medium term. We find that IMF programs significantly increase the probability of subsequent sovereign defaults by approximately 1.5 to 2 percentage points. These results cannot be attributed to...

According to expressive law theories, expression of values is an important function played by the law. Expressive laws affect behavior, not by threatening sanctions or promising rewards, but by changing individual preferences and tastes and, in some cases, by affecting social norms and values....