This articles reviews the arguments for consumer protection policies by the government by referring to the Nobel prices on asymmetric information problems. It discusses criteria for assessing the empirical importance of lemons goods and comments on the relative merits of quality constraints and...

The paper presents a perfect foresight intertemporal equilibrium model of the land, rental and housing markets in order to explore and evaluate the causes of vacant land. It studies a number of taxes including a capital gains tax, a capital income tax, a tax on the value of vacant land and a tax...

Germany is in a dilemma. Low wage competition via product and factor markets increases the demands on the welfare state, but increased systems competition in the context of international factor mobility reduces the possibilities of maintaining it. The welfare state has important allocative...

Based on explicit present value calculations, the paper criticizes the view that the PAYGO system wastes economic resources. In present value terms, there is nothing to be gained from a transition to a funded system even though the latter offers a permanently higher rate of return. The sum of...

This paper shows that the double taxation of corporate dividends (or profit repatriations) implies a nucleus theory of the corporation. After the firm is set up with a small stock of original capital, it enters a phase of purely internal growth during which no dividends are paid and no shares...