The assessment that the implementation of efficient outcomes by means of decentralized spontaneous solutions is to be expected for private goods, but not for public goods has become part of the conventional wisdom of our discipline. This paper uses a mechanism design approach to clarify under...

The report provides an analysis of the financial crisis of 2007/2008 and draws some conclusions about the need for regulatory reform. The analysis ascribes the crisis not only to problems in subprime mortgage lending and securitization, but also to excessive maturity transformation and...

The paper studies insurance with moral hazard in a system of contingent-claims markets. Insurance buyers are modelled as Cournot monopolists or oligopolists. The other agents condition their expectations on market prices, as in models of rational-expectations equilibrium with asymmetric...

The paper develops an integrated model of optimal nonlinear income taxation, public-goods provision and pricing in a large economy. With asymmetric information about labour productivities and publicgoods preferences, the multidimensional mechanism design problem becomes tractable by requiring...

The paper provides a new proof of the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, in a more general model, under weaker assumptions. The analysis focusses on the (weakly) relaxed problem in which upward incentive constraints are replaced by a monotonicity condition on consumption. Without...

For the standard specification of the utilitarian optimal income tax problem with hidden characteristics, the paper shows that randomized tax schemes are undesirable if preferences exhibit a property of weakly decreasing risk aversion according to the multidimensional risk aversion concept of...

Die geplante materielle Privatisierung der Deutschen Bahn AG kann als logischer Schritt der formalen Bahnprivatisierung vom 1.1.1994 angesehen werden. Welche Privatisierungsmodelle werden gegenwärtig diskutiert? Sollte die Deutsche Bahn AG mit oder ohne ihr Betriebsnetz an die Börse gehen? Ist...

Die vierte Alfred-Weber-Lecture des Instituts für Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Universität Heidelberg hielt am 12. Mai 2009 Prof. Martin Hellwig, Ph.D. zum Thema „Systemische Risiken im Finanzsektor: Eine Analyse der Finanzkrise“.Prof. Martin Hellwig, Ph.D. gilt als einer der...

The paper develops a technique for studying incentive problems with unidimensional hidden characteristics. The technique supports a unified approach, which can be applied regardless of whether the type set is finite, the type distribution has a continuous density, or the type distribution has...