Within the economic profession, it is a widely held view that the fiscal criteria of the Maastricht treaty are arbitrary numbers without economic foundation. Much of this criticism seems to overlook an important aspect - the strategic dimension of the criteria. This paper focuses on one...

Regional transfers are assumed to have an impact on the public opinion towards the benefactor, but empirical evidence is still scarce. In this paper we test this hypothesis for the structural funds of the European Union (EU) by combining detailed data on regional transfers with public opinion...

Individual sales prices and local vacancy rates in the housing market pose a natural analogy to the wage curve, a popular concept in labor economics that describes how individual wages decrease with higher local unemployment. While housing search and matching models and housing externalities...

Aufbauend auf der Hypothese, dass Arbeitsmärkte durch unvollständige Information charakterisiert sind, werden in diesem Arbeitspapier neuere Entwicklungen innerhalb eines Zweiges informationsökonomischer Ansätze vorgestellt: der Suchtheorie. Dabei werden ausführlich insbesondere jene...

From 1 January 2005 onwards the European Union has launched the first largescale international carbon emissions trading program. As the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) covers only part of domestic carbon emissions, it implies a hybrid environmental regulation scheme: Each EU Member State...

Drawing on recent work on the creation and breakup of countries, this paper examines the impact of economic and political integration on the vertical government structure. It argues that by increasing the market size and the benefits from the decentralized provision of public goods, integration...

We investigate the impact of cartel breakdowns on merger activity. Merging information on cartel cases decided by the European Commission (EC) between 2000 and 2011 with a detailed data set of worldwide merger activity, we find that, first, the average number of all merger transactions increase...

We empirically investigate the determinants of self-reporting under the European corporate leniency program. Applying a data set consisting of 442 firm groups that participated in 76 cartels decided by the European Commission between 2000 and 2011, we find that the probability of a firm becoming...