This paper considers education investment and public education policy in closed and open economies with an extortionary government. The extortionary government in a closed economy chooses an education policy in order to overcome a hold-up problem of time-consistent taxation similar to benevolent...

In this paper we briefly report some key data on educational expenditure and output in OECD countries and then turn to the motivations for public education. Public education can be important for equal opportunities and has a number of redistributional aspects within and between generations. We...

This paper uses a model of human capital accumulation, labour market distortions, word-of-mouth communication, and community formation to analyse socio-economic stratification, educational choices and intergenerational social mobility. Workers obtain information about job opportunities from...

Countries compete for new FDI investment, whereas stocks of FDI generate agglomeration benefits and are potentially subject to extortionary taxation. We study the interaction between these aspects in a simple vintage capital framework with discrete time and infinite horizon, focussing on Markov...

Altruists and envious people who meet in contests are symbionts. They do better than a population of narrowly rational individuals. If there are only altruists and envious individuals, a particular mixture of altruists and envious individuals is evolutionarily stable.

Why is there delay in contests? In this paper we follow and extend the line of reasoning of Carl von Clausewitz to explain delay. For a given contest technology, delay may occur if there is an asymmetry between defense and attack, if the expected change in relative strengths is moderate, and if...

This paper compares education investment in closed and open economies without government and with a benevolent government. Closed economies suffer from a holdup problem of excessive redistribution, and governments use education policy as a second-best tool. Globalization that increases labor...

We study the effect of size differences for an optimal risk sharing system of intergovernmental transfers in Germany. The German fiscal transfer system should account for the fact that an optimal insurance mechanism has the property that smaller states contribute a smaller share of their tax...