The paper investigates the effects of intra-family talent transmission when human capital exhibits indivisibilities and parental financing of education involves borrowing constraints. Positive talent correlation reduces social mobility but steady state inequality and macroeconomic...

Underweight and obesity are associated with adverse health outcomes throughout the life course. We estimated the individual and combined prevalence of underweight or thinness and obesity, and their changes, from 1990 to 2022 for adults and school-aged children and adolescents in 200 countries...

The (socio-)psychological concepts of individual aspiration for conformity and consistency are integrated into the rational-choice framework. 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...

Redistributive taxation and education subsidies are common policies intended to foster education attendance of poor children. However, this paper shows that in an intergenerational framework, these policies can raise social mobility only for some investment situations but not in general. I also...

Using a new panel dataset comprising publication and appointment data for 889 German academic economists over a quarter of a century, we confirm the familiar hypothesis that publications are important for professorial appointments, but find only a small negative effect of appointments on...

This paper compares student evaluation of teaching on the web site MeinProf.de to the standard evaluation procedures at German universities. While MeinProf offers the advantage of a broad, publicly available database, a number of theoretical and econometric problems emerge. Many of these...

Post-docs signal their ability to do science and teaching to get a tenure giving universities the possibility of separating highly talented agents from the low talented ones. However separating that means signalling effort for the highly talented becomes even more important in a two-dimensional...

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...

Based on the premise that fairness is different from equity and that it is primarily used in informal contexts we present an economic approach to fairness. Discussing the results of behavioral economics reveals the experience that people do not accept a monetary offer even if that collides with...

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...