Against the background of the worldwide financial market and economic crisis, leading German economists urge policymakers to maintain the reform course in labor market policy. The experts warn not to jeopardize the clearly positive effects of the recent reform efforts. The "Petersberg...

This paper develops a competition theory framework that evaluates an important aspect of the OECD’s Harmful Tax Practices Initiative against tax havens. We show that the sequential nature of the process is harmful and more costly than a “big bang” multilateral agreement. The sequentiality...

If a small cost applies for learning the corporate tax rules in different countries, this can completely eliminate tax competition. This modified version of the Diamond paradox and can also explain the empirically observed tax cuts cum base broadening.

This article studies the explanatory power of intangible factors - such as country stereotypes and consumer perceptions - for the size of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, controlling for fundamental variables. To operationalize the concept of these intangibles we use the idea of the...

Consider a community with individuals who consume a private good and use a congestible facility. Without a congestion fee, use of the congestible facility will exceed the socially optimal level. We show that under some conditions this externality problem can be solved by income redistribution....

Properly specified pavement deterioration models are an important input for the efficient management of pavements, the allocation of cost responsibilities to various vehicle classes for their use of the highway system, and the design of pavement structures. However, most empirical deterioration...

Consider a community with individuals who consume a private good and use a congestible facility. Without a congestion fee, use of the congestible facility will exceed the socially optimal level. We show that under some conditions this externality problem can be solved by income redistribution....

We find experimental evidence that the decision problem of tax compliance changes if subjects’ declarations are not randomly assessed, but is based on their appearance as captured by pictures of their faces, even if the aggregate audit probability does not change. Some subjects may fear that...

We study an all-pay contest with multiple identical prizes ("lifeboat seats"). Prizes are partitioned into subsets of prizes ("lifeboats"). Players play a twostage game. First, each player chooses an element of the partition ("a lifeboat"). Then each player competes for a prize in the subset...