The European Union faces several simultaneous threats to its competitiveness: weakness in the industries of the future, insufficient innovation, expensive energy, the need to green its economy, and geopolitical and trade shifts, to name but a few. The EconPol Europe Annual Conference, on whose...

Various options are being discussed to increase Germany's defense capabilities. Increasing the size of the Bundeswehr is proving difficult, and compulsory military service hardly seems feasible for economic and socio-political reasons. A European army and technological alternatives such as...

Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase financial distress due to increased borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan. Four years after hire,...

Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan. Four years after hire, automatic enrollment causes no...

Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan. Four years after hire, automatic enrollment causes no...

We study the relationship between market structure and public procurement outcomes. In particular, we ask whether and to what extent consolidation-driven increases in industry concentration affect the way in which the government procures its goods and services. We focus on the defense industry,...