Volkswirtschaft - Open Access LMU - Teil 01/03 Archiv

Lujo Brentano (1844-1931) hat sich als "realistischen" Ökonomen verstanden. Im Bereich der Arbeitsmarkttheorie sind zwei Bereiche von besonderem Interesse: Seine Untersuchungen über den Zusammenhang zwischen Lohn, Arbeitszeit und Arbeitsleistung und seine Überlegungen zur Bildung von kollektiven Formen der Lohnsetzung. Diese beiden Themen werden unter Einbeziehung gesamtwirtschaftlicher und methodischer Aspekte und einiger moderner Gesichtspunkte diskutiert.

Due to exceptionally low birth rates, the dynamism of Europe will be lagging behind that of other regions of the world for the time being. The paper assembles a rich body of comparative empirical data to clarify the extent of the demographic problems for the EU countries. It advances the view that the low birth rates in part result from early government interventions in terms of socializing the fruits of human capital investment via the pay-as-you-go pension system. To mitigate the extent of socialization, it considers a policy of freezing the contribution rates within the existing pensions systems, forcing the childless to save and providing an additional tax-financed "child pension" tax to parents.

We propose a life-cycle model of the housing market with a property ladder and a credit constraint. We focus on equilibria which replicate the facts that credit constraints delay some households' first home purchase and force other households to buy a home smaller than they would like. The model helps us identify a powerful driver of the housing market: the ability of young households to afford the down payment on a starter home, and in particular their income. The model also highlights a channel whereby changes in income may yield housing price overshooting, with prices of trade-up homes displaying the most volatility, and a positive correlation between housing prices and transactions. This channel relies on the capital gains or losses on starter homes incurred by credit-constrained owners. We provide empirical support for our arguments with evidence from both the U.K. and the U.S.

This paper analyses a model of vertical product differentiation with one incumbent and one entrant firm. It is shown that if firms can produce only one quality level welfare in this entry game can be lower than in monopoly. This is the case if qualities are strategic complements because the incumbent may distort its quality downwards. If firms can produce a quality range and practice non-linear pricing welfare in case of entry deterrence is higher than in monopoly because the incumbent enlarges its product line. If entry is accommodated consumer rent increases but the consequences on welfare are ambiguous.

This paper analyses a two-sided market in which two platforms compete against each other. One side, the advertisers, exerts a negative externality on the ther side, the users. It is shown that if platforms can charge advertisers only, a higher degree of competition for users can lead to higher profits because competition on the advertisers' side is reduced. If platforms can charge users as well, profits might increase or decrease, the latter because of increased competition through the additional instrument of the user fee. Nevertheless the equilibrium with user fee is more efficient.

This paper studies the incentives for multiproduct duopolists to sell their products as a bundle. It is shown that contrary to the monopoly case bundling may reduce profits and increase consumer rent. This is the case if consumers' reservation values are negatively correlated. The reason is that bundling reduces consumer heterogeneity and makes price competition more aggressive. This effect can dominate the sorting effect that is well known for the monopoly case. Firms are in a prisoner's dilemma situation because they would be better off without bundling. Despite the lower prices a welfare loss occurs because some consumers do not buy their prefered product which results in distributive inefficiency. If firms can influence the correlation by choosing their location in the product range they try to avoid negative correlation and choose minimal differentiation in one good.

In his seminal Social Choice and Individual Values, Kenneth Arrow stated that his theory applies to voting. Many voting theorists have been convinced that, on account of Arrow’s theorem, all voting methods must be seriously flawed. Arrow’s theory is strictly ordinal, the cardinal aggregation of preferences being explicitly rejected. In this paper I point out that all voting methods are cardinal and therefore outside the reach of Arrow’s result. Parallel to Arrow’s ordinal approach, there evolved a consistent cardinal theory of collective choice. This theory, most prominently associated with the work of Harsanyi, continued the older utilitarian tradition in a more formal style. The purpose of this paper is to show that various derivations of utilitarian SWFs can also be used to derive utilitarian voting (UV). By this I mean a voting rule that allows the voter to score each alternative in accordance with a given scale. UV-k indicates a scale with k distinct values. The general theory leaves k to be determined on pragmatic grounds. A (1,0) scale gives approval voting. I prefer the scale (1,0,-1) and refer to the resulting voting rule as evaluative voting. A conclusion of the paper is that the defects of conventional voting methods result not from Arrow’s theorem, but rather from restrictions imposed on voters’ expression of their preferences. The analysis is extended to strategic voting, utilizing a novel set of assumptions regarding voter behavior.

Aiming to further explore possible underlying causes for the recent stagnation in American heights, this paper describes the result of analysis of the commercial U.S. Sizing Survey. Using zip codes available in the data set, we consider geographic correlates of height such as local poverty rate, median income, and population density. We find that after adjusting for variables known to influence height such as income and education, population density is negatively correlated with height among white men, but only marginally among white women. Similar analysis of Body Mass Index (BMI) also shows a negative correlation with population density after adjustment for income, education, and age for both sexes. Local economic conditions as measured by median income, unemployment rate or poverty rate do not have a strong correlation with height or weight after adjusting for individual income and education.

This paper analyses capital tax competition between jurisdictions of different size when multinational firms can shift some fraction of their tax base between them. For the case of revenue maximizing governments, we show that introducing profit shifting will not generally increase downward pressure on tax rates. We find that profit shifting decreases the tax-base elasticity of the low tax jurisdiction while increasing the elasticity of the high tax jurisdiction. Therefore, by the direct (impact) effect, tax rates will converge as a result of additional profit shifting opportunities. In general equilibrium, however, tax rates may decrease or increase in both jurisdictions.

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.

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.

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.