This paper investigates the influence of political regimes on the relative importance of conspicuous consumption. We use the division of Germany into the communist GDR and the democratic FRG and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. Relying on household data that are representative...

It has been generally accepted for unilateral-care models that care incentives are not affected by the use of either accurate damages or average damages if injurers lack knowledge of the precise damage level they might cause. This paper shows that in bilateral-care models with heterogeneous...

This paper shows that fairness concerns are a stand-alone driver of self-reporting as part of optimal law enforcement. If society cares about individuals who are wrongly acquitted or are wrongly convicted, self-reporting is advantageous. This continues to hold as we allow for fairness concerns...

This paper shows that individual risk-type uncertainty can prevent reforms of the insurance system that would benefit the majority of individuals. We consider the case where a subset of the population is uncertain of their risk type and contrast two insurance regimes the status quo of mandated...

This paper considers victim heterogeneity in harm levels in a bilateral-care model, where harm is private information. In practice, resources are expended on the verification of damages suffered. We establish a sufficient condition for the possibility to accurately deduce the harm level from the...

The literature argues that if injurers cannot anticipate the precise level of harm, courts might use expected harm as a magnitude of compensation instead of actual harm without distorting care incentives. This paper shows that the use of expected harm is in fact preferable if victims choose the...

This paper analyzes care incentives of individuals in a bilateral-harm setting if care choices are sequential. We find that the efficient outcome is not guaranteed under any liability rule considered, irrespective of whether information is perfect or imperfect. Furthermore, it is no longer...

This paper considers the tax evasion decision when taxes constitute contributions to the financing of social insurance programs, such as un employment insurance. We call this evasion contribution evasion and establish that critical differences exist between contribution evasion and tax evasion,...

This paper considers the case that potential victims affect each other by taking care. Analyzing standard liability rules, we show that strict liability with a defense of contributory negligence is in the best position to induce the efficient outcome, i.e., this liability rule ensures efficiency...