A lack of transparency about policy performance can pose a major obstacle to welfare-enhancing policy competition across jurisdictions. In parallel surveys with German citizens and state parliamentarians, we…
In this paper, we present a way that allows to make fundamental statements about how economic action entails harmful effects on the environment. These effects are due to natural scientific reasons and are…
While effective bureaucracy is crucial for state capacity, its decision-making remains a black box. We elicit preferences of 900+ real-world public procurement officials in Finland and Germany. This is an…
The approach by Engelberg, Manski, and Williams (2009) to convert probabilistic survey responses into continuous probability distributions implicitly assumes that the question intervals are equally wide. Almost…
We study a fundamental reform of the public Disability Insurance (DI) system in Germany. Effective 2001, cohorts born after 1960 are no longer eligible for “occupational DI.” Occupational DI (ODI) implies…
The shock of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the human capital formation of children and youths. As a consequence of this disruption, the pandemic is likely to imply permanent lower levels of human capital. This…
We investigate the impact of public procurement spending on business survival. Using Italy as a laboratory, we construct a large-scale dataset on firms---covering balance-sheet, income-statement, and…
