We investigate the welfare effects of policies that increase voter turnout in costly voting models. In a generalized costly voting model, we show that if the electorate is sufficiently large, then increasing voter turnout is generically efficient. Increasing turnout in small elections is only inefficient if the electorate is evenly divided or if there is already almost complete voter participat...

A human subject laboratory experiment compares the real-time market performance of the two most popular auction formats for online ad space, Vickrey-ClarkeGroves (VCG) and Generalized Second Price (GSP). Theoretical predictions made in papers by Varian (2007) and Edelman, et al. (2007) seem to organize the data well overall. Efficiency under VCG exceeds that under GSP in nearly all treatments. ...

This article investigates the effects and transmission channels of shocks between two asymmetric neighboring countries. In particular, we investigate Austria and Germany which are highly integrated due to their common language and common membership of the European Monetary Union. Generalized impulse response functions reveal that there are large and significant effects of shocks to the German e...

The Impact of Participation in Sports on Educational Attainment: New Evidence from Germany We analyze the impact of exercising sports during childhood and adolescence on educational attainment. The theoretical framework is based on models of allocation of time and educational productivity. Using the rich information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we apply generalized ordered prob...

As internet users query search engines, relevant advertisements accompany the search results. Advertisers bid for limited ad spots in a generalized-secondary auction employed by search engines. This paper uses publically-available data from Google to test strategies advertisers may use when deciding where and how much to bid for a keyword phrase. A predictive model of suggested bid price may pr...

The Eubank (2012, JDS) findings on taxation, political accountability and foreign aid has had an important influence in academic and policy-making debates. Eubank has warned that his findings should not be generalized across Africa until they are backed by robust empirical evidence. This paper puts some empirical structure to the celebrated literature. The empirical evidence which is based on d...

We study the outcome of an immigration amnesty for a government that faces a trade-off between minimizing the number of unwanted immigrants and expanding the tax base. Since the government is not credible when announcing a generalized amnesty, both the fiscal benefit and the stock of illegal immigrants are sub-optimal. In addition, we argue that amnesties can occur only at irregular intervals a...

Self-Serving Use of Equity Rules in Bargaining with Asymmetric Outside Options We experimentally investigate multiple notions of equity in ultimatum bargaining with asymmetric outside options. Building on the generalized equity principle formulated by Selten (1978), we derive three different equity rules that can explain 43% of all offers. Our withinsubject design further allows us to show that...

This paper tests whether consumption pattern in Korea exhibits a time-inconsistent discounting behavior using a quasi-hyperbolic Euler equation estimated by the generalized method of moments (GMM). In particular, we examine whether consumers change their discounting behavior during financial crises in 1997 and 2008. The estimation results show that Korean consumers exhibit a time-inconsistent q...