This paper uses German evidence to address two questions about corporate governance. The effects of ownership on corporate governance have received much recent attention, but very little of this has been devoted to the appropriate way to measure firm ownership. The results of this paper show...

The paper argues that the weakest link principle, which has been widely used as a measure of ultimate owners? control rights, has a number of serious problems. A theoretically more satisfactory method of measuring control rights, based on voting power indices, is proposed, and the different...

Concentrated ownership of large listed companies is widespread throughout the world, and Germany is typical in this respect. This paper proposes a method of distinguishing empirically between the beneficial and harmful effects of ownership concentration, and applies it to German data. The...

Deposit systems for one-way beverage containers are widely supported by green activists and have been implemented in several countries. This paper analyzes whether such deposit systems can optimally internalize the externalities that result when consumers dump these containers. It is shown that...

Economists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, according to Greif, enforced contracts multilaterally through a closed, private-order coalition'. We show that this view is untenable. The Maghribis used formal legal mechanisms and entered business...

Although European economic history provides essentially no support for the view that education of the general population has a positive causal effect on economic growth, a recent paper by Becker, Hornung and Woessmann (Education and catch-up in the Industrial Revolution, 2011) claims that such...

The paper shows that a comparison of the appropriately-weighted sum of households' marginal willingness to pay for a public good with the net effect of the increased supply of the public good on shadow, as distinct from actual, government revenue is a generally valid rule for public good...

This paper characterises the domestic tax systems which yield Pareto-efficient outcomes for a two-country world economy in which each country uses distortionary taxes. Such outcomes are compared with the Nash equilibria of the world economy when each country uses its domestic tax system to...

The paper analyses the gains from trade in distortionary tax revenue between countries, focussing on the case where lump-sum reveue transfers are restricted. In this case, trade taxes can be used to transfer government revenue between countries, and such taxes will typically be used in...