Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the...

Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the...

In July 2001 the 70-year-old German Rabattgesetz that prevented negotiations in retail business has been abolished. During the abolition process consumer- as well as retailer pressure groups claimed that significant damages for their clients were to be expected. Using game theoretic modelling...

The information quality of mandatory financial reporting depends on two factors: (1) Are standards appropriate to produce financial statements that provide investors with sufficient information? (2) Is compliance to standards enforced by appropriate institutions? This paper addresses the...

Any cooperation that profits from relation-specific investments suffers from the well-known hold-up problem. If investments are not enforceable by an outside authority, the gains fall prey to individual opportunism caused by a free-rider problem. If, in addition, individual investments exhibit...

Having a child out of wedlock used to be associated with shame and scorn. This is mostly not the case anymore in the western world. Therefore, freed from social sanctions, single motherhood has become an additional family-choice alternative for women, along with marriage and childlessness. Yet,...

Male and female social roles are largely predicated on the fact that male and female reproductive functions are separated in different individuals. This paper asks why gonochorism rather than hermaphroditism, is the rule among vertebrates. We argue that hermaphroditism may be unstable in the...

Numerous (high-tax) countries presume that multinational firms use their transferpricing policies to shift profits into countries with lower tax rates. To avoid the corresponding loss in tax revenues, tax authorities develop constantly tightening rules to curb transfer-price distortions....