FG VWL, insbesondere Mikroökonomik
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- FG VWL, insbesondere Mikroökonomik (60) (remove)
With its foundation in 1945, UNESCO declared as its main purpose the promotion of international cultural exchange1. A number of legal instruments (Conventions, Recommendations and Declarations) should duly help to substantiate that general purpose and make it work in practice. In this process, the regulation of the international exchange of cultural property plays a key role. However, the proper regulation of cultural property exchange has been a highly controversial issue. This paper focus on UNESCO's guiding ideas and conceptions of cultural property, international exchange and regulation. The central question is: Are the regulations codified in UNESCO’s Conventions and Recommendations helpful in encouraging international cultural exchange or are we faced, due to the neglect of private agents and the roles they play in cultural exchange, with some sort of one-sided regulation running counter to that aim? The author argues that UNESCO's legal instruments are driven by and express a strong anti-private and anti-market bias, which produce problematic economic incentives in the art and antiquities world to the disadvantage of the international exchange of cultural property.
The peer review system in academic publishing performs two important functions by screening a manuscript for its quality, and by helping to further improve an author's work. However, it often fails to perform these functions in a satisfactory manner. We argue that property rights theory can be fruitfully applied to understand these shortcomings, and to develop reform proposals. The present paper discusses the incentive-problems in journal peer review from an institutional economics perspective, arguing that the incentives of both authors and reviewers to fully exploit a manuscript's potential depend on their property rights. Based on this theory of peer review, we argue that the recent proposal of an “as is” review policy combined with increased accountability of referees can be expected to result in a higher efficiency of peer review.
Pointing out the remarkable levels of hostile interaction in the air space over contested territory between states like China and Japan or Greece and Turkey we argue that air space incursions can be interpreted as a rational strategy with ultimately political aims. In our interpretation deliberate intrusions of military aircraft into sensitive air space serve as an indirect risk-generating mechanism, as they will trigger scrambles of the opposed government's air force which may escalate into a military crisis. We derive testable hypotheses from a game-theoretic model, which we developed in earlier work to explore the strategic logic behind this risk-generating mechanism more rigorously. In order to test whether the model's predictions regarding the effect of short-term economic developments on the states' interaction hold, we built a database of daily event observations from the Hellenic National Defence General Staff reports of the last 4 years, containing time series data of Turkish intrusions into Greek-claimed air space and the number of dogfights between Greek and Turkish fighter planes. What we find is that not only Greek engagements of Turkish intruders but also massed, provocative Turkish intrusions have become significantly less likely after the onset of the Greek economic crisis. These findings are well in line with the predictions of the model and thus supportive of our theory.
Greece and its creditors concluded negotiations over a third bailout by signing a Memorandum of Understanding on 19 August 2015. The dominant view among most economic policy analysts and commentators seems to be that the actions of the Greek government in the months before the deal had been erratic and lacked coordination. In this paper we argue instead that the decisions of the Greek leaders, including asking the voters to reject the earlier terms demanded by the creditors in a referendum, can be rationally explained by the logic of brinkmanship. We develop a game-theoretic model to show that the actions of the Greek government are consistent with a strategy aimed at getting a better bailout deal.
This paper examines the process of economic policy-making under conditions of model uncertainty. A median voter model is introduced in which the electorate is uncertain of the policy measures available as well as their respective outcomes and opinion formation is a social process of communication and contagion. Learning from experience is also considered. It is shown that economic policy-making under uncertainty produces novel policy routines, but that a mechanism of efficiently utilising the generated knowledge is missing.
An explanation for tax morale based upon a simple model of psychological costs that depend on the perceived legitimacy of public policies is introduced. It is shown that empirically observed low levels of tax evasion can be explained even for a risk-neutral taxpayer with such a model. In a discussion of aggregate tax revenue, it is argued that tax revenue as a function of tax rates may differ fundamentally from the notorious Laffer curve. It is then necessary to look at the interaction of formal and informal institutions to predict the nominal tax rates chosen by a revenue maximizer.