This paper assesses the role of the public sector in adaptation to climate change. We first offer a definition and categorisation of climate change adaptation. We then consider the primary economic principles that can guide the assignment of adaptation tasks to either the private or the public...

The birth of children often shifts the power balance within a family. If family decisions are made according to the spouses' welfare function, this shift in power may lead to a time consistency problem. The allocation of resources after the birth of children may differ from the ex-ante optimal...

We study how the shadow economy affects pollution and how this effect depends on corruption levels in public administration. Production in the shadow economy allows firms to avoid environmental regulation policies; a large informal sector may be accompanied by higher pollution levels. Our...

Many decisions in politics and business are made by teams rather than by single individuals. In contrast, economic models typically assume an individual rational decision maker. A rapidly growing body of (experimental) literature investigates team decisions in different settings. We study team...

We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information

We develop a simple model of fiscal competition among ageing municipalities. When ageing advances, gerontocracies and social planners gradually substitute publicly provided goods aimed at the mobile young population for publicly provided goods for the elderly. This substitution process does not...

We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany's state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29...

Most European economies will experience significant demographic changes in the decades ahead. Due to low birth rates, populations are shrinking and ageing at the same time. This paper explores the impact of demographic change on the banking industry. A unique data set, which contains detailed...

Demographic change will be one of the most challenging issues for industrialized economies in the decades to come. In this paper, we focus on the impact of demographic change on labour markets. By setting up a stylized model of a regional labour market, we are able to analyze the interaction of...

The future consequences of climate change are highly uncertain. Today, the exact size of possible future damages are widely unknown. Governments try to cope with these risks by investing in mitigation and adaptation measures. Mitigation aims at a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions whereas...