This paper compares education investment in closed and open economies without government and with a benevolent government. Closed economies suffer from a holdup problem of excessive redistribution, and governments use education policy as a second-best tool. Globalization that increases labor...

We study the effect of size differences for an optimal risk sharing system of intergovernmental transfers in Germany. The German fiscal transfer system should account for the fact that an optimal insurance mechanism has the property that smaller states contribute a smaller share of their tax...

The formation of an alliance in conflict situations is known to suffer from a collective action problem and from the potential of internal conflict. We show that budget constraints of an intermediate size can overcome this strong disadvantage and explain the formation of alliances.

In a Stackelberg framework of capital income taxation it is shown that imposing a minimum tax rate that is lower than all countries' equilibrium tax rates in the non-cooperative equilibrium may reduce equilibrium tax rates in all countries.

It can be advantageous for an office motivated party A to spend effort to make it public that a group of voters will lose from party A’s policy proposal. Such effort is called inverse campaigning. The inverse campaigning equilibria are described for the case where the two parties can...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...

We study the effects of patriotism on tax compliance. In particular, we assume that individuals feel a (random draw of) warm glow from honestly paying their taxes. A higher expected warm glow reduces the government's optimal audit probability and yields higher tax compliance. Second, individuals...

For patriotic citizens, living in their native country is intrinsically preferable compared to living in the diaspora. In this paper, we analyze the implications of such a patriotic lock-in in a world with international migration and redistributive taxation. In a formal model of redistribution...

Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat entschieden, dass die Erhebung einheitlicher Beitragssätze in der Gesetzlichen Pflegeversicherung für Personen mit und ohne Kinder gegen den Gleichheitsgrundsatz der Verfassung verstoße. In dieser Arbeit prüfen wir unterschiedliche Argumente dafür,...

We study a setting with search frictions in the marriage market and with incomplete contracting inside the family. Everyone prefers a partner that has high income and is a perfect emotional match, but compromises must often be struck. A high income earner may abstain from marrying a low-income...