An increase in legally binding severance payments creates both an incentive and a disincentive for workers to invest in firmspecific human capital. Which effect prevails on balance depends on the productivity of the worker's human capital investment. For strong positive reactions, increases in...

We analyze non-cooperative commodity taxation in a symmetric two- country trade model characterized by monopolistic competition and inter- national firm and capital mobility. In this setting, taxes in one country affect foreign welfare through the relocation of mobile firms and through changes...

For more than 150 years, many economists have assumed public subsidies on higher education to have a regressive distributional effect. The German debate on this issue is kept alive by many empirical studies. Most of them confirm the thesis of a \"perverse distribution of income\" (Milton...

In standard models of New Economic Geography the overall regional price index in the centre is lower than in the periphery, because trade in manufacturing imposes transportation costs whereas trade in agriculture is assumed to be costless. Since real world observations suggest higher overall...

In this paper we analyze the political economics of different strategies to implement revenue neutral reforms of a complicated income tax system ('tax-cut-cum-base-broadening'). We set up a straightforward social choice model where individuals initially have two deduction possibilities from the...

Standard models of the new trade and location theories usually assume full employment and are thus ill-equipped to study spatial unemployment differences, which in reality are more pronounced that income disparities. Regional labour market theories like the ´wage curve´-approach on the other...

This paper develops a proposal for an international multilevel competition policy system, which draws on the insights of the analysis of multilevel systems of institutions. In doing so, it targets to contribute bridging a gap in the current world economic order, i.e. the lack of supranational...

The need for management of the marine ecosystem using a broad perspective has been recommended under a variety of names. This paper uses the term Ecosystem Management, which is seen as a convergence between the ecological idea of an organisational hierarchy and the idea of strategic planning...

Advances in competition economics as well as in computational and empirical methods have offered the scope for the employment of merger simulation models in merger control procedures during the past almost 15 years. Merger simulation is, nevertheless, still a very young and innovative instrument...

Ecosystem Management requires models that can link the ecosystem level to the operation level. This link can be created by an ecosystem production model. Because the function of the individual fish in the marine ecosystem, seen in trophic context, is closely related to its size, the model groups...