It is often argued that the optimal level of public good provision is below the first-best level as long as the government's expenditures have to be financed by distortionary taxes. I examine this hypothesis and show that it is correct in a representative consumer economy if (i) the public good...

Recently, it became customary to argue that environmental quality - like ordinary public consumption - is crowded out by distortionary taxation. We show that this hypothesis does not hold provided that the marginal revenue of the environmental tax is positive. In this case, under-provision of...

Due to the use of distortionary taxation, real-world economies should attain a lower level of public expenditures than one might suspect from the analysis of artificial models where lump-sum taxes are assumed to be available. The paper examines this popular hypothesis by means of the two-type...

Using the traditional model of voluntary public good provision, it is shown that an expansion of group size exacerbates free riding tendencies as long as private consumption and the public good are strictly normal and weak gross substitutes. This result generalizes a previous Cobb-Douglas...

What drives the long-term demand for mineral commodities? This paper provides empirical evidence on the long-run demand for mineral commodities since 1840. I extend the partial adjustment model to account for country-specific structures and technological change. I find that a one percent...

According to the previous literature on hiring, ?rms face a trade-off when deciding on external recruiting: From an incentive perspective, external recruiting is harmful since admission of external candidates reduces internal workers’ career incentives. However, if external workers have high...

Understanding how physicians respond to incentives from payment schemes is a central concern in health economics research. We introduce a controlled laboratory experiment to analyse the influence of incentives from fee-for-service and capitation payments on physicians’ supply of medical...

This paper describes a method for solving a class of forward-looking Markov-switching Rational Expectations models under noisy measurement, by specifying the unobservable expectations component as a general-measurable function of the observable states of the system, to be determined optimally...

Standard search models are inconsistent with the amount of frictional wage dis- persion found in U.S. data. We resolve this apparent puzzle by modeling skill development (learning by doing on the job, skill loss during unemployment) and duration dependence in unemployment benets in a random on...

Participants of dynamic competition games may prefer to play with the rules of the game by systematically withholding e¤ort in the beginning. Such behavior is referred to as sandbagging. I consider a two-period con- test between heterogeneous players and analyze potential sandbagging of...