FG VWL, insbesondere Mikroökonomik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Scientific journal article peer-reviewed (60) (remove)
Way of publication
- Open Access (2)
Keywords
- Inequality (3)
- Economic policy (2)
- Fiscal federalism (2)
- Formal institutions (2)
- Informal institutions (2)
- Paternalismus (2)
- Redistribution (2)
- Social norms (2)
- Tax evasion (2)
- Tax morale (2)
- collective learning (2)
- Academic journals (1)
- Ancient Athens (1)
- Anti-terrorism policies (1)
- Behavioral political economics (1)
- Behavioral political economy (1)
- Brinkmanship (1)
- Bryce Law (1)
- Centralisation (1)
- Centralization (1)
- Civil war (1)
- Classical liberalism (1)
- Cognitive biases (1)
- Cognitive dissonance (1)
- Collective beliefs (1)
- Collective learning (1)
- Constitutional economics (1)
- Corruption (1)
- Creative destruction (1)
- Crisis management (1)
- Cultural evolution (1)
- Darwinism (1)
- Deterrence (1)
- Diffusion of innovations (1)
- Direct democracy (1)
- Electoral systems (1)
- Evolution (1)
- Expressive behavior (1)
- Fairness (1)
- Federalism (1)
- Fiscal decentralization (1)
- Fiscal referendums (1)
- Government Centralization (1)
- Grants in aid (1)
- Greek debt crisis (1)
- H26 (1)
- Happiness (1)
- Inclusive institutions (1)
- Income distribution (1)
- Industriepolitik (1)
- Innovation (1)
- Innovation Policy (1)
- Innovationspolitik (1)
- Institutional Evolution (1)
- Institutional evolution (1)
- Intra-elite competition (1)
- Justice (1)
- Knowledge spillovers (1)
- Libertarian paternalism (1)
- Life satisfaction (1)
- Model uncertainty (1)
- National Champions (1)
- Nationale Industriestrategie (1)
- Ordnungsökonomik (1)
- Organized crime (1)
- Paternalism (1)
- Peer review policy (1)
- Policy decentralisation (1)
- Political apathy (1)
- Political ideology (1)
- Political non-neutrality (1)
- Popitz Law (1)
- Presidential and parliamentary regimes (1)
- Property rights (1)
- Public good provision (1)
- Public security (1)
- Rational irrationality (1)
- Reciprocity (1)
- Regional growth (1)
- Rent seeking (1)
- Representative democracy (1)
- Research and development (1)
- Schumpeterian political economy (1)
- Scientific publishing (1)
- Soft paternalism (1)
- Solon (1)
- Sour grapes (1)
- State and Local Autonomy (1)
- Structural Change (1)
- Structural change (1)
- Strukturwandel (1)
- Subjective well-being (1)
- Terrorism (1)
- Verhaltensökonomik (1)
- Voting (1)
- World Values Survey (1)
- Z13 (1)
- autocracies (1)
- economic performance (1)
- economics and psychology (1)
- expressives Verhalten (1)
- fiscal competition (1)
- fiscal decentralization (1)
- fiscal federalism (1)
- growth (1)
- inequality (1)
- inkonsistente Präferenzen (1)
- military spending (1)
- model uncertainty (1)
- nationale Champions (1)
- net wealth tax (1)
- path-dependent rule-evolution (1)
- political innovation (1)
- political legitimacy (1)
- positive constitutional economics (1)
- public entrepreneurship (1)
- redistribution (1)
- reform processes (1)
- rent-seeking (1)
- wealth (1)
Institute
- FG VWL, insbesondere Mikroökonomik (60) (remove)
We study a model that establishes a novel theoretical rationale for the empirically well-documented relation between inequality and corruption. According to our model, inequality can nurture corruption by empowering organized crime because collusion between local police forces and criminal organizations is more likely in societies characterized by high inequality or weak security forces. Law enforcement and organized crime have a strong incentive to collude due to efficiency gains from specialization. However, their agreement breaks down when the mobsters can no longer credibly commit to joint rent maximization and thus start to compete with law enforcement for citizens’ wealth. The mobsters then non-violently monopolize the market for extortion by undercutting the police forces, similar to a strategy of predatory pricing. Criminal collusion is thus not very different from its corporate equivalent; hence, similar policy measures should be promising. In addition, our model also suggests that the criminal organization’s higher efficiency in extracting rents has a greater impact when the relative power between law enforcement and organized crime is rather balanced. Accordingly, when violent conflict becomes less predictable, non-violent elements of relative power become more relevant. Our model also allows for the interpretation that in the absence of strong social norms against corruption, organized crime is more difficult to challenge.
In 594 BCE, the Athenian lawgiver Solon, called upon to resolve a deepening social crisis, introduced a new constitution and mandated that in civil conflicts, no citizen is to remain apathetic and must take sides. Because the law seemed to support strife, it presents a puzzle. The paper offers a political economy rationale for Solon’s law against neutrality, modeling social conflict as a rent-seeking competition. We divide society into three groups, a hereditary aristocracy, which monopolized power before the Solonian constitution, a rival wealth-based commercial elite, called the new Solonian elite, and the poor, who are enfranchised only partly. We then identify the conditions under which the third group is better off by allying with one of the other groups, protecting the Solonian constitution. In our framework, Solon’s ban on neutrality is an attempt to change the payoffs from violent redistributions of rents, so that conflict is avoided. Accordingly, the ban should not only impede excessive rent seeking, but also prevent the exclusion of any social group.
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.
Wir analysieren die Nationale Industriestrategie 2030, die im Februar 2019 vom Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie veröffentlicht wurde. Bei dieser Strategie handelt es sich um einen Versuch, vertikale Industriepolitik in Deutschland zu stärken. Wir argumentieren, dass die theoretische und empirische Rechtfertigung für diese Strategie insgesamt schwach ist. Die vom Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi) vorgeschlagenen Instrumente weisen meist nur eine sehr geringe Passgenauigkeit zur mittelständisch geprägten deutschen Unternehmenslandschaft auf. Sie stellen Anforderungen an die Fähigkeiten der staatlichen Entscheidungsträger, die in der Realität kaum vorzufinden sind. Eine sinnvolle Alternative würde in einer Rückbesinnung auf ordnungspolitische Prinzipien, insbesondere die Gewährleistung einer hohen Wettbewerbsintensität, bestehen.
In this note, we outline a general framework for analyzing how inequality and military spending interact in a society governed by a rent-seeking autocrat. Relying on a general equilibrium model, we show that, generally, the autocrat utilizes the military for redistribution in favor of poorer citizens. However, the dictator’s own rent-seeking activity weakens the extent of redistribution and, in the extreme, can even reverse its direction, yielding more unequal secondary distributions instead. Accordingly, the initial level of inequality also affects the impact of military spending on inequality as the former has an impact on the extent of both, the regime’s rent-seeking activity as well as redistribution. Here, our model shows that primary and secondary distributions are rather equal for extreme initial equality/inequality. For medium levels of initial inequality, redistribution is rather large and can be in favor of the poor or of the rich, depending on the extent of rent-seeking and the primary distribution. Based on these results, we highlight the importance of a society’s institutional framework for analyzing the relation of inequality and military spending.
Zwischen homo oeconomicus und homo sapiens: ein Nobelpreis für Realismus in den Verhaltensannahmen
(2018)
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.
Using a framework that distinguishes short-term consumer preferences, individual reflective preferences and political preferences, we discuss from a constitutional economics perspective whether individuals find it in their common constitutional interest to endow representatives and bureaucrats with the competence to impose soft paternalist policies. The focus is specifically on soft paternalist policies, because these often work with non-transparent 'nudges' that are considered as manipulative in some contributions to the literature. We show that those soft paternalist policies that are manipulative indeed collide with three criteria of consumer sovereignty, reflective sovereignty and citizen sovereignty that can be argued to represent common constitutional interest of citizens. On the other hand, we argue that the set of paternalist policies that is deemed acceptable on the constitutional level is restricted to non-manipulative instruments, and their application as government policies is limited to cases with stable and very homogenous preferences. However, we also argue that competitive markets are capable of supplying many mechanisms that allow individuals to cope with problems in their decision-making processes on a private level.
The theoretical literature on the economics of fiscal federalism has identified several potential effects of government decentralization on economic growth. Much of the traditional literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services. However, decentralization may also increase growth by raising the ability of the political system to innovate and carry out reforms. On the contrary, some authors argue that decentralization increases corruption and government inefficiency. After a discussion of the theoretical arguments, we provide both a traditional survey and a meta-analysis of the empirical literature on decentralization and economic growth. Based on our survey, we identify open questions and discuss possible ways of answering them.
This paper argues that an evolutionary approach to policy-making, which emphasizes openness to change and political variety, is particularly compatible with the central tenets of classical liberalism. The chief reasons are that classical liberalism acknowledges the ubiquity of uncertainty, as well as heterogeneity in preferences and beliefs, and generally embraces gradual social and economic change that arises from accidental variation rather than deliberate, large-scale planning. In contrast, our arguments cast doubt on a different claim, namely that classical liberalism is particularly compatible with the evolutionary biological heritage of humans.
In explaining individual behavior in politics, economists should rely on the same motivational assumptions they use to explain behavior in the market: that is what Political Economy, understood as the application of economics to the study of political processes, is all about. In its standard variant, individuals who play the game of politics should also be considered rational and self-interested, unlike the benevolent despot of traditional welfare economics. History repeats itself with the rise of behavioral economics: Assuming cognitive biases to be present in the market, but not in politics, behavioral economists often call for government to intervene in a “benevolent” way. Recently, however, political economists have started to apply behavioral economics insights to the study of political processes, thereby re-establishing a unified methodology. This paper surveys the current state of the emerging field of “behavioral political economy” and considers the scope for further research.
We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-)distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD countries between 1981 and 1998. The evidence indicates that presidential regimes are associated with a less equal distribution of disposable incomes, while electoral systems have no significant effects. Fiscal competition is associated with less income redistribution and a less equal distribution of disposable incomes, but also with a more equal primary income distribution. Our evidence also is in line with earlier empirical contributions that find a positive relationship between trade openness and equality in primary and disposable incomes, as well as the overall redistributive effort.
In den letzten Jahren hat sich ein breiter Literatur
strang etabliert, der
neue Formen paternalistischer Interventionen vorschl
ägt, um individuelle Entscheidungen zu
verbessern, die nicht vollständig rational sind. Di
e Motivation hierfür liegt in zahlreichen
Verhaltensanomalien und anderen Abweichungen vom Mo
dell vollständiger Rationalität, die
von der empirischen Verhaltensökonomik identifizier
t wurden. Der neue Paternalismus
zeichnet sich nach seinen Befürwortern dadurch aus,
dass er ‘libertär’ ist, da die betroffenen
Individuen in die als effizient erachtete Richtung
geschubst, aber nicht gezwungen werden.
Die Möglichkeit zu abweichendem Verhalten soll grun
dsätzlich erhalten bleiben. In diesem
Papier wird der neue Paternalismus aus einer ordnung
sökonomischen Perspektive untersucht.
Es wird gezeigt, dass wichtige Varianten des neuen
Paternalismus mit den
ordnungsökonomischen Steuerungsidealen der Konsumen
tensouveränität und der
Bürgersouveränität kollidieren.
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.
We argue that perceived fairness of the income generation process affects the association between income inequality and subjective well-being, and that there are systematic differences in this regard between countries that are characterized by a high or, respectively, low level of actual fairness. Using a simple model of individual labor market participation under uncertainty, we predict that high levels of perceived fairness cause higher levels of individual welfare, and lower support for income redistribution. Income inequality is predicted to have a more favorable impact on subjective well-being for individuals with high fairness perceptions. This relationship is predicted to be stronger in societies that are characterized by low actual fairness. Using data on subjective well-being and a broad set of fairness measures from a pseudo micro-panel from the WVS over the 1990–2008 period, we find strong support for the negative (positive) association between fairness perceptions and the demand for more equal incomes (subjective well-being). We also find strong empirical support for the predicted differences in individual tolerance for income inequality, and the predicted influence of actual fairness.
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.
This paper surveys possible motivations for having a net wealth tax. After giving a short overview over the state of wealth taxation in OECD countries, we discuss both popular arguments for such a tax, as well as economic arguments. It is argued that classical normative principles of taxation known from public economics cannot give a sound justification for a net wealth tax. The efficiency-related effects are also discussed and shown to be theoretically ambiguous, while empirical evidence hints at a negative effect on GDP growth. Finally, it is argued that despite of widespread and persistent lobbying for a revitalization of the net wealth tax, this is unlikely to happen due to political economy constraints.
We analyze the rise and decline of the steel and mining industries in the regions of Saarland, Lorraine and Luxembourg. Our main focus is on the period of structural decline in these industries after the second world war. Differences in the institutional framework of these regions are exploited to analyze the way in which the broader fiscal constitution sets incentives for governments either to obstruct or to encourage structural change in the private sector. Our main result is that fiscal autonomy of a region subjected to structural change in its private sector is associated with a relatively faster decline of employment in the sectors affected. Contrary to the political lore, fiscal transfers appear not to be used to speed up the destruction of old sectors, but rather to stabilize them.
This paper discusses soft (or libertarian) paternalism, as proposed among others by Thaler and Sunstein (2008). It is argued that soft paternalism should not be understood as an efficiency-enhancing, but as a redistributive concept. The relationship between soft paternalism and social norms is discussed in detail. In particular, it is argued that soft paternalism increases the stability of given social norms, which in turn need not be efficient, nor in the material self-interest of a majority of individuals. Soft paternalism is argued to be an essentially conservative concept of policy-making in the sense that it tends to increase the longevity of status quo social norms.
In this paper, we offer both a broad survey of the literature on fiscal federalism and long-run economic performance, and a detailed report of some of our own recent studies in this field. We look at the difference between study types (cross-country versus single-country studies), and at the relevance of the broader institutional framework into which fiscal decentralization is embedded. We also look into structural change and intergovernmental transfers as a detailed mechanism through which federalism may have an impact on aggregate economic performance.It turns out that fiscal decentralization has no robust effect on growth, but the evidence hints at a positive effect on overall productivity, conditional on the broader institutional framework.
A Tale of Two Federalisms: Long-Term Institutional Change in the United States and in Germany
(2011)
This paper offers a comparison of government centralization in the United States and in Germany. After briefly laying out the history of federalism in both countries, we identify the instruments of centralization at work. It is argued that an initial constitutional framework of competitive federalism does not prevent the long-term centralization of competencies. Against a background of historical evidence, we discuss the political economics of government centralization. It is argued that formal institutions clearly have an effect on the pathways of government centralization, but not necessarily on the broader trend of centralization. The conclusion is reached that preservation of state and local autonomy may eventually hinge on informal political institutions.
In diesem Papier wird das Konzept des liberalen Paternalismus diskutiert, dessen Vertreter überzeugt sind, die Qualität der Entscheidungen von Individuen durch ein effizientes
Design der Randbedingungen dieser Entscheidungen verbessern zu können. Nach einem Überblick über die verhaltensökonomischen Grundlagen des liberalen Paternalismus werden
insbesondere seine normativen Grundlagen und politisch-ökonomischen Implikationen
diskutiert. Es zeigt sich, dass paternalistische Ansätze selbst Entscheidungen häufig verzerren werden und dass eine Verbesserung der Qualität individueller Entscheidungen höchst
zweifelhaft ist.
The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional spillovers is developed in which uncertainty over the true preferences of candidates makes strategic delegation impossible. Instead, it is shown that the existence of rent extraction by delegates alone suffices to make cooperative centralisation more likely through representative democracy. In the non-cooperative case, the more extensive possibilities for institutional design under representative democracy increase the likelihood of centralisation. Direct democracy may thus be interpreted as a federalism-preserving institution.
Rational Ignorance Is Not Bliss: When Do Lazy Voters Learn from Decentralised Political Experiments?
(2008)
A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. Often, an analogy between market competition as a discovery procedure and political competition is used to corroborate this argument. We argue that political learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a given stock of policy-related knowledge which was costly to accumulate, so that yardstick competition is improbable to function well particularly for complex issues, if representatives' actions are tightly controlled by the electorate. We show that factor mobility does have the potential to endogenously disturb equilibria on regional markets for political theories, and therefore does provide for improved political learning processes compared to unitary systems. But the results we can expect are far from the ideal mechanisms of producing and utilising knowledge often described in the literature. In particular, collective learning may occur in the relatively efficient region, while the status quo may be fortified in the relatively inefficient region.