The EU's Cohesion Policy (CP) intends to promote European economic, social, and territorial cohesion. The policy occupies about a third of the EU budget and it is the most evaluated of all EU policies. With the support of the German Ministry of Finance, two in-depth ZEW research papers by...

Guay and Johnston (2022) examine asymmetric politically motivated reasoning on the part of liberals and conservaites. In our replication of the paper we examine four potential issues with the analysis: confounding in the numeracy task, heterogeneity across ideological constraints, the use of...

There are two common views of pork barrel spending. One is that pork barrel spending benefits special interests at the expense of social welfare, hence antithetical to responsible policymaking, especially in times of crisis. An alternative is that pork “greases the legislative wheels” making...

Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and...

Risk premia are significantly elevated during periods of democratization in a cross-country panel of equity data covering 85 countries over 200 years, despite little evidence of a negative effect on either realized or expected GDP and dividends. This result is explained in an asset pricing model...

Existing models of contagious currency crises are summarized and surveyed, and it is argued that more weight should be put on political factors. Towards this end, the concept of political contagion introduced, whereby contagion in speculative attacks across currencies arises solely because of...

How do foreign interests influence the policy determination process? What are the welfare implications of such foreign influence? In this paper we develop a model of foreign influence and apply it to the study of optimal tariffs. We develop a two-country voting model of electoral competition,...

This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more left-wing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more right-wing. Parents, politicians and voters are probably not aware of this phenomenon - nor are social scientists. The paper discusses its economic and evolutionary roots. It also...

We develop and test an economic theory of insurgency motivated by the informal literature and by recent military doctrine. We model a three-way contest between violent rebels, a government seeking to minimize violence by mixing service provision and coercion, and civilians deciding whether to...

Institutional ownership of U.S. corporations has increased ten-fold since 1950. We examine whether these new concentrated owners influence portfolio firms' political activities, as a window into the larger question of whether institutional investors can wield their control to extract benefits...

Strong sustanbility demands that decisions on climate mitigation be guided by a climate target and that compliance with the target be the primary concern prior to saving mitigation cost. Climate targets have often been formulated as temperature targets and for the case of uncertainty about...

This article investigates the trade-off between increasing welfare losses and increasing peak-warming if a temperature target is reformulated as a subsidiary concentration or cumulative emissions target. We apply a welfare maximizing integrated assessment model for a deterministic...

Recently several countries have experienced a drop in popularity of national political parties, accompanied by the success of independent movements (e.g. “Civic Lists” in Italy). I exploit the success of “Civic Lists” in Italian municipalities and use them as a comparison group for...

Wie lassen sich Glück und Nachhaltigkeit verbinden? Um die gegenwärtige ressourcenintensive Lebensweise zu überwinden, braucht es neue Leitbilder von subjektivem Wohlbefinden, die das gute Leben jenseits von Produktion und Konsum verorten. Die bisherige Debatte um Suffizienz und Postwachstum...

Frontmatter -- Inhalt -- Dank -- 1. Einleitung -- 2. Ausgangslage und Problemstellung -- 3. Erkenntnisse der Glücksforschung -- 4. Philosophische Ideenlehren des guten Lebens -- 5. Wohlbefinden und Materialistische Lebensweise -- 6. Elemente einer postmaterialistischen Lebensweise des...

This paper studies how a politician's term length affects public finances. I test whether the gradual increase from two- to four-year terms for American governors affects state finances using a rich state-year panel stretching back almost a century. The results show that adopting four-year terms...

Introduction / Rosemarie Fike, Stefanie Haeffele, and Arielle John -- Irrationality is not unreasonable : behavioral economics, rationality, and implications for public policy / Mario J. Rizzo -- What is a nudge? / Jeffrey Bristol -- Why nudges should be local and decentralized / Katarina Hall...

Nachhaltige Entwicklung ist zu einem verankerten Leitbild in Politik, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit geworden, welches die Diskussionen über die künftige Entwicklung der Menschheit bestimmt. Es geht im Kern um die Suche nach einem gerechten Zivilisations- und Wirtschaftsmodell,...

In der Februar-Umfrage des Ökonomenpanels von ifo und FAZ wurden Professoren für Volkswirtschaftslehre an deutschen Universitäten zu den Ergebnissen der Sondierungsgespräche zwischen CDU/CSU und SPD befragt. Eine Mehrzahl der Teilnehmer zeigte sich weitgehend enttäuscht von diesen...

This article examines the historical progress of Australian climate change policy. The article in particular examines several interesting and significant aspects of Australian climate law highlighting governmental approaches and processes leading to the introduction of those laws. The historical...

This book examines selected actions and investments of the European Central Bank (ECB) from a climate and sustainability standpoint. Shedding new light on the topic from various angles - ethical, philosophical, political, economical and legal - it situates sustainability mainstreaming in the...

Where do we stand when it comes to Sustainable Financial Markets? -- Ethical Standards beyond Monetary Policy: Approaches to a Philosophical Foundation -- Fundamental rights in the core business of the ECB: No issue?! Experience with the EU petition 429/2017 -- On the role of the ECB in...