When a region successfully attracts a large firm by offering tax concessions, outright subsidies etc., the firm often commits itself to performance targets in terms of investment or employment. This paper interprets these contractually fixed targets as a consequence of incomplete information. It...

We analyze the optimal tax choices of a revenue-maximizing government that levies taxes from firms of which the true degree of mobility is ex ante unknown. Differential tax treatment of immobile and mobile firms is ruled out, but the government may learn from the firms’ location responses to...

Education decisions determine a great part of future income. This paper argues that if education is financed by parents' current income a lump-sum tax reduces inequality if all parents have strict investment incentives. However, if some parents are indifferent there is a possible decrease in the...

The (socio-)psychological concepts of individual aspiration for con- formity and consistency are integrated into the rational-choice frame- work. By using this integrative approach it is shown that after a shock the aspiration for conformity results in an equilibrium which deviates from the homo...

The political blessings of federalism are the core of our discussion. These benefits are operationalized as the decrease in the number of outvoted in a federal system with majority voting as an important source of regime satisfaction. The approach originates from the work of Roland Pennock who...

We estimate vector error-correction models and vector autoregression models, respectively, for 13 European countries (1970–2005) to examine the — widely debated — relationship between population growth and economic growth. While for most European countries we find a positive long-run...

This paper considers optimal linear tax structures that are differentiated according to group membership. Groups can be heterogeneous with respect to both preferences and abilities. Contrary to most arguments in favour of tax privileges for certain groups, e.g. gender-based taxation, it is shown...

This paper deals with discrete labour supply decisions of different groups of persons in response to a change in net wage rates. The centrepiece of this approach is individuals' switching between working time categories, while facing switching costs that arise when people expand or reduce...

<title>Abstract</title> We discuss the economic aspects of fairness defined here in the benchmark case as equality of producer and consumer rents. We show that there are significant differences considering private and public goods, especially with regard to a potential self-damaging of the initially...