Inheritance taxes may induce heirs to discontinue family firms. Because firm dissolution incurs transaction costs, a preferential tax treatment of transferred family businesses seems to be desirable from a macroeconomic viewpoint. The support of dynastic succession, however, entails also a cost...

We develop a dynamic two-party political economy framework, in which parties seek to maximize vote share and face the trade-off between catering to their respective core constituencies on the one hand and ‘middle of the road’ voters with no partisan affiliation on the other hand. In contrast...

A positive relationship between firm size and product diversification is a long-standing stylized fact. However, so far there is no appropriate theoretical model to explain the underlying forces of this observation. This paper analyzes an oligopoly model with asymmetric multiproduct frms, which...

Incumbent firms have two basic possibilities to improve their competitive position in the product market: investment in R&D and the creation of entry barriers to the disadvantage of potential rivals, e.g. through lobbying activities, campaign contributions, bribes or the adoption of incompatible...

This paper examines the impact of capital market integration (CMI) on higher education and economic growth. We take into account that participation in higher education is non-compulsory and depends on individual choice. Integration increases (decreases) the incentives to participate in higher...

This paper develops a model with multiple market locations in which the quality of intangible assets of firms, provided by management, determines the firms. performance. Despite an ex ante symmetry of potential entrants, the equilibrium assignment of heterogeneous managerial skills to firms...

The paper revisits the debate on trickle-down growth in view of the widely discussed evolution of the earnings and income distribution that followed a massive public expansion of higher education. We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model to dynamically evaluate whether economic growth...

This paper shows that dynamic inefficiency can occur in dynamic general equilibrium models with fully optimizing, infinitely-lived households even in a situation with underinvestment. We identify necessary conditions for such a possibility and illustrate it in a standard R&D-based growth model....

This paper develops a two-sector R&D-based growth model with congestion effects from increasing urban population density. We show that endogenous technological progress causes structural change if there are positive productivity spillovers from the modern to the traditional sector and Engel’s...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...