This paper argues that equal per-capita health care premia offer no systematic advantage as an instrument of financing the welfare state. Either will simultaneous changes in the tax system be necessary to compensate their redistributive effects, in which case all efficiency gains derived from a switch to income-independent health care premia will also be lost. Alternatively, if one wants to change the progressiveness of the overall tax and social security system in Germany, this can equivalently be done through a reform of the tax system. This is shown using simplified formulae for the German system of income taxation and health care finance. Instead, it is argued that the advantage of equal per-capita premia lies in its potential to reduce health care expenditures, by way of facilitating the use of co-payment schemes which reduce the moral hazard problem in health care markets.

This paper is a reply to Barry Ickes' critique of my paper “Trust versus Illusion: What is Driving Demonetization in Russia?” in which I show that the data reject Barry Ickes' Virtual Economy explanation of barter in Russia in favor of an institutional explanation based on the lack of trust.

In this paper an alternative view of the relation between the wage level, wage dispersion, training incentives and employment is presented. We provide some theoretical arguments which cast doubt on the standard thesis that unemployment - especially in Germany - is mainly caused by labor market institutions and excessive wages. Rather there are several indications that a persistent lack of demand is responsible for the major part of the German unemployment problem.

The paper challenges the 'orthodox doctrine' of collective choice theory according to which Arrow’s 'general possibility theorem' precludes rational decision procedures generally and implies that in particular all voting procedures must be flawed. I point out that all voting procedures are cardinal and that Arrow’s result, based on preference orderings cannot apply to them. All voting procedures that have been proposed, with the exception of approval voting, involve restrictions on voters expressions of their preferences. These restrictions, not any general impossibility, are the cause of various well known pathologies. In the class of unrestricted voting procedures I favor 'evaluative voting' under which a voter can vote for or against any alternative, or abstain. I give a historical/conceptual analysis of the origins of theorists’ aversion to cardinal analysis in collective choice and voting theories.

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) claim that a combination of efficiency seeking and minmax preferences dominates inequity aversion in simple dictator games. This result relies on a strong subject pool effect. The participants of their experiments were undergraduate students of economics and business administration who self-selected into their field of study and learned early on that efficiency is desirable. We show that for non-economists the preference for efficiency is much less pronounced. We also find a gender effect indicating that women are more egalitarian than men. However, perhaps surprisingly, the dominance of equality over efficiency is unrelated to political attitudes.

In transition and developing countries, we observe rather high levels of

corruption even if they have democratic political systems. This is

surprising from a political economy perspective, as the majority of people

generally suffers from high corruption levels. Our model is based on the

fact that corrupt officials have to pay an entry fee to get lucrative

positions. In a probabilistic voting model, we show that a lack of financial

institutions can lead to more corruption as more voters become part of the

corrupt system. Well-functioning financial institutions, in turn, can

increase the political support for anti-corruption measures.

Government bonds are interest-bearing assets. Increasing public debt increases income, wealth, and consumption demand. The smaller government expenditure is, the larger consumption demand must be in equilibrium, and the larger must be public debt. Conversely, lower public debt implies higher government spending and taxation.

Public debt plays, thus, an important role in establishing equilibrium. It distributes output between consumers and government. In case of insufficient demand, a larger public debt entails higher consumption and less public spending. If upper bounds on public debt are introduced (as in the Maastricht treaty), such constraints place lower bounds on taxation and public spending or may even rule out the existence of macroeconomic equilibrium altogether.

Domar(1944) and Gehrels(1957) have discussed similar issues in an unemployment setting. In contrast, this note considers the full employment case and looks at adjustments in debt, taxes and government spending that preserve full employment. The explicit modelling of some adjustment processes that have not been considered in the earlier contributions leads to somewhat different and, in a sense, more "debt-friendly" results.

Abstract: Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. We study how business groups can substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. In a two period model, there is no contract enforcement in the first period. The firms within the business group are connected to each other by a vertical production structure, resulting in externalities due to double marginalization, and an internal capital market. Our model derives the sequencing of investments and the credit contract offered by the headquarters that solve the ex post moral hazard problem. Thus, the business group's organizational mode and the financial structure facilitate relational contracting.

The number of firm bankruptcies is surprisingly low in economies with poor institutions. We study a model of bank-firm relationship and show that the bank's decision to liquidate bad firms has two opposing effects. First, the bank gets a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it loses the rent from incumbent customers due to its informational advantage. We show that institutions must improve significantly in order to yield a stable equilibrium in which the optimal number of firms is liquidated. However, in a particular range, improving institutions may even decrease the number of bad firms liquidated.