Not sufficiently harmonised national pension systems within the European Union distort the allocation of labour and endanger redistributive activities. This paper identifies the most decentralised level of harmonisation which guarantees efficient allocation and enables redistribution. For this,...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

This article analyzes how the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has affected the privacy practices of FinTech firms. We study the content of 308 privacy statements respectively before and after the GDPR became binding. Using textual analysis methods, we find that the readability of the...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherin a state s representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversify his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

This paper considers family formation and reciprocity-based cooperation in the form of sharing of earnings-risk. While risk sharing is one benefit to marriage it is also limited by divorce risk. With search in the marriage market there may be multiple equilibria diering not only in divorce rates...

This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against...