We study management practices and performance in a representative sample of German municipalities, which provide the bulk of direct administrative services for citizens and firms in Germany. Surveyed municipalities differ substantially in their use of structured management practices, and this...

Several countries have recently introduced national capital standards exceeding the internationally coordinated Basel III rules, which is inconsistent with the 'race to the bottom' in capital standards found in the literature. We study regulatory competition when banks are heterogeneous and give...

The embedding effect has frequently been observed in willingness to pay (WTP) studies.Since policy implications of valuation studies can be very sensitive to the composition of thepackage being valued, respondents’ apparent insensitivity to such fundamental characteristicssuggests that it is...

This paper provides general and empirically implementable sufficient statistics formulas for optimal nonlinear tax systems in the presence of across-income heterogeneity in preferences, inheritances, income-shifting capabilities, and other sources. We study unrestricted tax systems on income and...

We analyze vertical structures where a regulated network operator serves n network users, and the network users compete in quantities for customers. We distinguish two cases: (i) none of the network users are related to the network operator (ownership unbundling), (ii) one of the network users...

In enhanced annuities, the annuity payment depends on one's state of health at some contracted date while in "standard annuities", it does not. The focus of this paper is on an annuity market where "standard" and enhanced annuities areoffered simultaneously. When all insured know equally well on...

This paper aims to investigate the relation between inefficiency in the Brazilian education system and municipal wealth, discussing how the actual legislation possibly influences it. To that end, we apply a stochastic frontier model which accommodates covariates in the asymmetric error component...

We consider a single object allocation problem with multidimensional signals and interdependent valuations. When agents signals are statistically independent, Jehiel and Moldovanu show that efficient and Bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms generally do not exist. In this paper, we extend...

Several division rules have been proposed in the literature regarding how anarbiter should divide a bankrupt estate. Different rules satisfy different sets ofaxioms, but all rules satisfy claims boundedness which requires that no contributorbe given more than her initial contribution. This paper...

In a large scale newspaper experiment 5,132 readers of the German weekly, Die Zeit, participated in a three-person bargaining game. In our data analysis we focus on (1) the influence of age, gender, profession and the medium chosen for participation on bargaining behavior and on (2) the external...