Given recent history it may be necessary to recall that the so-called Great Recession we have been witnessing for more than five years now was, first and foremost, a crisis of financial markets. One reason for rising debt levels at the outset of the crisis have been massive government...

In January 2009, the law on the reform of the inheritance tax and valuation law (German) came into force. As a result, the valuation of shares in non-listed corporations was fundamentally changed. The paper compares and analyzes different enterprise values through the application of different...

Changes in transportation are closely linked to the economic and logistical characteristics of the production system. The aim of this paper is, on the basis of data on the economic context and surveys conducted in France (the 1988 Shipper survey and the 2004 ECHO survey) and in Germany (the 2005...

We present an overlapping generations model with two families who can guarantee old age support either by intra-family transfers from child to parent or via a tax-financed public pension system encompassing both families.We derive the individually and family-specific optimal decisions and...

Economic decisions depend on both actual outcomes as well as perceived intentions. In this paper, we examine whether and how the relative importance of outcomes or intentions for economic decisions develops with age. We report the results of ultimatum games with children, teens and university...

We examine the degree of trust and trustworthiness in an experimental trust game with 662 participants from six different age groups, ranging from 8-year-olds to retired persons. Although both trust and trustworthiness have been identified as fundamental pillars for efficient economic...

Field data on the strategic use of deficits to limit the budgetary scope of future governments are inconclusive about the effects of political polarization or a government's re-election probability on fiscal policy. Therefore, we designed a controlled experiment to examine the strategic use of...

We test for the influence of government strength and dispersion of power among the parties of coalition governments on the size of annual debt accumulation through budget deficits in OECD-countries from 1970 to 1999. Government strength and power dispersion in coalition governments are measured...