We analyse the effect of a mandatory kindergarten for four-year-old children on mothers' labour supply in Switzerland. Since education policy is regulated on a federal level, we exploit spatial variation as well as staggered implementation. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find an...

This paper examines the effect of soda taxes on the consumption behaviour and health of school-aged children in Europe: Hungary imposed a "Public Health Product Tax" on several unhealthy products including sodas in 2011. France introduced solely a tax on sodas, containing sugar or artificial...

In the framework of spatial competition, two or more players strategically choose a location in order to attract consumers. It is assumed standardly that consumers with the same favorite location fully agree on the ranking of all possible locations. To investigate the necessity of this...

We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors’ expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an...

We consider an overlapping generations model where continuous cultural traits are transmitted from an adult generation to the children. A weighted social network describes how children are influenced not only by their parents but also by other role models within the society. Parents can invest...

We characterize the outcome of majority voting for single-peaked preferences on median spaces. This large class of preferences covers a variety of multi-dimensional policy spaces including products of lines (e.g. grids), trees, and hypercubes. Our main result is the following: If a Condorcet...