Provision of most public goods (e.g., health care, libraries, education, police, fire protection, utilities) can be characterised by a two-stage production process. In the first stage, basic inputs (e.g., labour and capital) are used to generate service potential (e.g., opening hours,...

We investigate redistributive taxation in a political economy experiment and determine how different patterns of social mobility affect the choices of redistributional taxes. In the absence of social mobility, voters choose tax rates that are very well in line with the prediction derived in the...

The strategic management literature has found it difficult to differentiate between collusive and efficiency-based synergies in horizontal merger activity. We propose a schematic to classify mergers that yields more information on merger types and merger effects, and that can, moreover,...

Based on a database of 326 merger cases scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and 2007, we evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004. We first propose a general framework to assess merger policy effectiveness, which is based on standard...

We study beliefs and choices in a repeated normal-form game. In addition to a baseline treatment with common knowledge of the game structure, feedback about choices in the previous period and random matching, we run treatments (i) with fixed matching, (ii) without information about the...

There is rarely another field in economics where the prevailing theoretical models have been contradicted so strongly by empirical evidence as exchange rate economics. This study therefore attempts to investigate exchange rate dynamics in an exploratory way. It is first demonstrated that the...

The strategic management literature has found it difficult to differentiate between collusive and efficiency-based synergies in horizontal merger activity. We propose a schematic to classify mergers that yields more information on merger types and merger effects, and that can, moreover,...

Internationale Organisationen greifen insbesondere seit dem Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts verstärkt in innergesellschaftliche Prozesse ein und treten immer öfter in direkte Herrschaftsbeziehungen mit Individuen. Die Einsätze zum Aufbau politischer Strukturen in Nachkriegsgesellschaften sind...

Much of what can be subsumed under the label of political cosmopolitanism argues that some internationalization of political authority is desirable because of the superior capability of international institutions in solving transnational problems. Surprisingly, however, few scholars have asked...

The European Commission, Europe's central supranational bureaucracy, is often depicted as a playground for external interests. The scholarly literature offers a range of sensible explanations how the Commission position is bound by national, organised societal, or party political interests....