A common view in public finance is that there is an efficiency-redistribution tradeoff in which distortions are tolerated in order to redistribute income. However, the fact that so much public- and private redistributive activity involves in-kind transfers rather than cash may be indicative of...

We provide comparable evidence on the patterns and trends in obesity across the Atlantic and analyse whether there are economic rationales for public intervention to control obesity. We take into account equity issues as well as efficiency considerations, which are organized around three...

Paternalism, merit goods and specific egalitarianism are concepts we sometimes meet in the literature. The thing in common is that the policy maker does not fully respect the consumer sovereignty principle and designs policies according to some other criterion than individuals' preferences....

Many political issues like abortion, gay marriage or assisted suicide are strongly contested because individuals have preferences not only over their own choice but also about other individuals' actions. How should society decide these issues? This paper compares three regimes (centralization,...

When the public provision of private goods is partial rather than universal, public supply may be supplemented by the entry of private firms in the market for the private good. The main purpose of this paper is to explore whether partial public provision helps or hinders aggregate access to the...

The ancient Greek conception of oikonomia is often dismissed as irrelevant for making sense of the contemporary economic world. In this paper, I emphasize a thread that runs through the history of economic thought connecting the oikos to modern public economics. By conceptualizing the public...

When do politicians in developing democracies prioritize meritocratic recruitment over patronage hiring for public sector jobs? I distinguish between menial and professional positions and argue that the former are valuable for sustaining party machines, while manipulating the latter can...

This paper discusses Judge Guido Calabresi's use of the concept of merit goods in his book The Future of Law and Economics (2016). It addresses the following questions: (1) What does Calabresi's conceptualisation of merit good share with the main lines of arguments in the literature for...

Richard Musgrave coined the terminology of merit wants and merit goods in the 1950s in the context of the theory of public finance. He pointed out that certain goods such as free school lunches or subsidies to low cost housing did not have pure public or private good characteristics. If a...

Einleitung -- Nudge – Ökonomische Grundlagen und Definition -- Nudge in Deutschland – Die Einordnung des Konzepts und seine rechtliche Bewertung -- Rechtliche Bewertung von Nudge – Die praktische Anwendung im Verwaltungsrecht -- Schluss.

Industrial heritage is a public good and either the public or the third sector have to intervene on a free exchange basis to ensure its preservation. Also, it is a merit good and has to be protected regardless of the collective preferences. The paper is an empirical inquiry into the nature and...

Do people give primacy to merit when luck partly determines earnings? This paper reports from a novel experiment where third-party spectators have to decide whether to redistribute from a high-earner to a low-earner in cases where earnings are determined by luck and merit. The experiment has...

Intergovernmental finance is a significant source of sub-national finance in most countries. In both industrial and developing countries, formula based "manna from heaven" general purpose transfers dominate but co-exist with highly intrusive micro-managed "command and control" specific purpose...

In his Theory of Public Finance (1959), Musgrave invented the concept of merit wants to describe public wants that are satisfied by goods provided by the government in violation of the principle of consumer sovereignty. Starting from Musgrave's mature discussion (1987), I construct two...

Paternalism is an attempt to influence individuals' decisions for their own benefit, even if there are no third parties involved. This seems to contradict normative individualism, which provides the general orientation to our modern democracies. Soft or libertarian paternalism accepts the...

Paternalism is an attempt to influence individuals' decisions for their own benefit, even if there are no third parties involved. This seems to contradict normative individualism, which provides the general orientation to our modern democracies. Soft or libertarian paternalism accepts the...

Prior studies that try to explain who gets tenure and why remain inconclusive, especially on whether non-meritocratic factors influence who becomes a professor. On the basis of career and publication data of virtually all sociologists working in German sociology departments, we test how...

We investigate experimentally whether the protégés' reaction to paternalism depends on the consequences of the paternalistic action to their well-being. We find that protégé punish a paternalist restricting their freedom of choice. Yet, this negative reaction is not based on principled...

The paper deals with impulsive consumption and highlights the roles that cognitive and motivational aspects of reflexive thought (namely self-control and self-image motives, respectively) play in intertemporal decisions. While self-control inhibits individuals from consuming impulsively,...

We investigate experimentally whether the protégés' reaction to paternalism depends on the consequences of the paternalistic action to their well-being. We find that protégé punish a paternalist restricting their freedom of choice. Yet, this negative reaction is not based on principled...

We analyse attempts to implement personalised regulation in the form of sin licenses (O'Donoghue and Rabin 2003, 2005, 2007) to correct the distortion in the consumption of a harmful good when consumers suffer from varying degrees of self-control problems. We take into account the possibility...

Bei dem vorliegenden Text handelt es sich um eine überarbeitete Version meiner Magisterarbeit, die ich im Jahre 2011 am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) angefertigt und an der Sozialwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen eingereicht habe. Im...

This article is an empirical inquiry into the nature and causes of the preservation and reuse of railway heritage from a comparative point of view. It addresses the question of why this heritage is not preserved in Andalusia (Spain). Railway heritage is a mixed good, as a public good requires...

Is Friedrich von Hayek in some specific, perhaps paradoxical, way a classical liberal paternalist? My answer will be an unsatisfying yes and no depending not only on my interpretation of Hayek, but also on the manifold interpretations one can give to the concepts of paternalism and classical...

In einem ersten Hauptteil wird eine mangelnde publizistische Vielfalt der Medien als Folge zweier Marktmängel beschrieben: zum einen als Folge einer fehlenden direkten Ausschließbarkeit, die zu einer Finanzierung aus Werbeeinnahmen und damit verbundenen Vielfaltsminderungen geführt hat, zum...