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Empirically, responsibility is a concept increasingly made use of in order to address societal issues. At the same time, it is a concept mainstream economics has, so far, hardly touched on. The paper shows that the application of economic reasoning to the responsibility concept can instruct a twofold learning process: First, the very tradition of economics allows to better understand and elaborate the semantics of responsibility. Here, the paper develops the concept of ordo-responsibility that differentiates between the initial basic game and the related meta-games. The focus thus shifts to the rule- setting processes and rule-finding discourses for which the actors can accept governance responsibility and discourse responsibility, respectively. Second, the rational-choice analysis of the responsibility concept also produces important insights for mainstream economic theory. Building on a simple model that delineates the responsibility aptitude of an actor, the paper explains why standard economics tends to attribute the rule-setting function exclusively to state actors. Yet, as the underlying nation-state paradigm depends on social determinants that are not universally given, such economic theory shows a double blind spot. Against this backdrop, the paper sketches out how to broaden the conventional perspective and identifies policy recommendations for state actors and business corporations.

Two basic tenets of theWalrasian model, behavior based on self-interested exogenous preferences and complete and costless contracting have recently come under critical scrutiny. First, social norms and psychological dispositions extending beyond the selfish motives of Homo economicus may have an important bearing on outcomes, even in competitive markets. Second, market outcomes depend on strategic interactions in which power in the political sense is exercised. It follows that economics must become more behavioral and more institutional. We can return to these themes of the classical tradition, now equipped with more the powerful mathematical tools developed over the past century.

The given thesis includes three independent chapters which all contribute to the theory of public economics. They are linked, theoretically, by the fact that an information asymmetry is included in the presented environment. In the first two chapters agents are assumed to hold private information on their preferences. Making use of a mechanism design approach, applications such as a bilateral trade problem, the provision of a public good and the design of an optimal income tax schedule are studied. More precisely, Chapter 1 relates discrete and continuous formulations of the independent private values model and derives conditions under which these two behave qualitatively the same. Chapter 2 studies how a Mirrleesian income tax model is affected by the assumption of arbitrary directions of redistribution and addresses the question how the corresponding optimal income tax schedules should be designed. In the third chapter individuals are incompletely informed about the characteristics of a public good. Only incomplete information on the good's productivity and governmental contributions are available such that salience becomes a driving factor for individual behavior and hence, the provision of the good. A common aim of all three chapters is to disentangle and evaluate the effects of information asymmetry in the respective setting. In an environment as considered in the first two chapters, individuals being privately informed about preferences yields a social cost. Thus, only a second-best situation can be reached where welfare is lower compared to a full information environment. However, this is not true in a situation as studied in Chapter 3. Here, the information asymmetry can be exploited by a benevolent government to improve welfare compared to a situation with complete information. Conclusively, the effects of information asymmetry on welfare and optimal allocations are non-trivial and depend on the considered environment.

The measurement of academic output in Ireland is of growing interest in the context of the government's strategy to identify and support centres of research excellence and to encourage inter-institutional collaboration in both research and fourth- level education. This paper looks at research output within the economics profession in these various centres, building on an earlier literature (Barrett and Lucey, 2003: Coupe and Walsh, 2003) which looked at the research output of Irish economists in peer-reviewed journals. Using a relatively new data-base, Scopus, we find that research output in the Republic of Ireland is heavily skewed by researcher and by institution and that the more productive and most cited Irish research economists are heavily concentrated in the Greater Dublin area.

This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters. The first chapter studies political competition with endogenously formed political parties. Party formation allows policy-motivated citizens to coordinate their political behavior, and crucially affects political outcomes. In political equilibria with two active parties, both platforms can neither be fully convergent as in the median voter model, nor extremely polarized as in the citizen candidate model. The second chapter investigates the effects of political institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to empower competent politicians. Political institutions that increase the concentration of political power in the hands of the election winner involve a trade-off. On the one hand, higher power concentration enables the voters' preferred politician to enforce larger parts of his agenda. On the other hand, higher concentration of power increases electoral stakes and thereby induces stronger distortions in policy choice. We identify a negative relation between the optimal level of power concentration and the extent of the politicians' office motivation. The results of an empirical analysis are in line with this prediction. The third chapter studies optimal income taxation in a model with labor supply responses at the intensive and the extensive margin. In contrast to the classical Mirrlees framework, a utilitarian desire for redistribution does not pin down the signs of optimal marginal taxes and optimal participation taxes. The chapter uncovers a non-standard tradeoff between efficiency at the intensive margin and efficiency at the extensive margin, which complements the standard equity-efficiency tradeoff and provides the economic intuition behind the ambiguous sign of the optimal marginal income tax.

This thesis contributes to the understanding of media markets by studying the determinants of media outlets' content choice, by developing novel techniques to assess media bias, and by analyzing the welfare effects of potential regulations. Chapter 2 demonstrates that advertising has a causal positive effect on content differentiation on YouTube, in particular, an exogenous increase in the technically feasible advertising quantity reduces the YouTubers' probability to duplicate mainstream content. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 develop novel techniques and applications to measure political media bias. Finally, Chapter 6 shows that commercial media bias can be mitigated by a cap on advertising quantity. The results contribute to the literature on content differentiation in (digital) media markets, political media bias, commercial media bias, two-sided (media) markets, media content as a public good, and user-generated content.

This thesis consists of three independent chapters. The first chapter addresses the question how taxes in the financial sector affect the real economy. One set of results concerns the tax burden: Given a fixed public budget and positive equilibrium profits, one can shift the tax burden from households to banks (and vice versa) by appropriately tweaking tax rates. A second set of results accesses the general equilibrium effects of various proposals to reform the value added tax treatment of financial services. The second chapter explores how equity concerns affect the optimal level of environmental taxation. It shows that higher levels of desired redistribution call for lower levels of green taxes. It also clarifies the relation of optimality rules and optimal tax levels. The third chapter asks why a voter might want to vote for a small party that will have not a say in parliament. It shows that passionate supporters can have an incentive to vote for a party despite expecting the party to fail the election threshold. The reason is that their votes signal a strong backing in the population and increase the party's chances to enter parliament at the next election.

The thesis at hand presents four 'stand-alone' essays in energy economics. The first essay is motivated by the basic idea that utility resulting from electricity consumption differs in every hour of the day. This hypothesis translates into a deeper analysis on demand elasticities of higher temporal resolution. The empirical results show that German hourly demand elasticity ranges from -0.02 to -0.13 with a distinct demand elasticity pattern. The second essay investigates the influences of regulation and gas prices on the emission levels of fossil power plants for all states in the U.S. It implicitly addresses the switch from coal-based generation to a less carbon-intense gas-fired generation over a thirteen years period. Besides best practice states, the results show that lower gas prices and stringent carefully designed CO2 regulations are suitable means to reduce CO2 emissions. Essays three and four investigate the impact on residential demand reduction through policy interventions specifically targeting a change in electricity use. As such, essay three investigates with the help of synthetic control groups the roll out of smart meters over a 13-year period and shows a significant negative impact of Advanced Metering Infrastructure on monthly residential electricity consumption that ranges from 6.1% to 6.4%. Essay four investigates conservation programs that have been established shortly after the Californian Energy Crisis in order to curb electricity consumption. The results show that short term programs have been effective leading to quarterly reductions between 6% to 12%. The essay furthermore provides evidence that some residential consumers must have been able to change consumption habits to uncover the majority of this reduction.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to an innovative agenda in the field of Environmental Economics. The paper focusses on a conceptual and political perspective on the interactions between nature and economy. Section 1 states that Environmental Economics has to consider three fields: nature, justice and the role of time. To operationalize this claim, we introduce fundamental concepts such as entropy, joint production, ignorance, evolution, absolute scarcity, responsibility and homo politicus and explain them in Section 2. These concepts are applied in Section 3 using a historical example, namely the soda-chlorine industry, extending over a period of about three centuries. The lessons taken from this economic, environmental and political evolution are outlined in Section 4. In Section 5, we apply the concept of responsibility to address political aspects dealt with when examining the interplay between nature and economy. In our outlook in Section 6, we argue that these concepts and further concepts do not form a hierarchically structured system. Instead they are conceived as a network of interdependent concepts that reference each other but also remain categorically distinct from one another.

The 2018 Vatican document Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones examines the relationship between ethics and economics in the context of contemporary issues in finance. The relationship between ethics, business, finance, and economic life in general is a major theme of the document. This paper explores these themes in greater depth examining the importance of the virtues, education and culture in promoting an economy that serves society. It then applies a proper Christian anthropology of the human person to problems of political economy in relation to the regulation of markets and, in doing so, tries to unify the different topics discussed in the document and situate it more clearly within the tradition of Catholic social teaching and the role of the state that is posited in that teaching.

The sustainable management of natural resources is one of the most important tasks humanity faces. The interdisciplinary online platform MINE-Mapping the Interplay between Nature andEconomy (www.nature-economy.de) aims to contribute to this. MINE can be understood as a bridge between social sciences, economics and the natural sciences. Important building blocks of this bridge are considerations from the fields of political philosophy and ethics. For socioecological transformation processes, MINE offers foundations that are theoretically comprehensive and at the same time practical for politics and economics. Our considerations show how the ideas of MINE came into being, what constitutes the peculiarity of its approach and what it is capable of achieving. In this way, interested persons from the scientific community as well as ecologically engaged citizens should be led towards a fruitful work with the online platform. After the introduction in Part I, in Part II, from the perspective of Malte Faber, who speaks in first-person, motives and experiences are recounted that have led him to found an interdisciplinary research cooperation since 1980. The methods and insight generated in this cooperation became groundbreaking for MINE. Part III deals with the importance of philosophical reasoning for MINE and addresses some guiding ideas and basic building blocks of MINE's approach from a philosophical perspective. In Part IV, five concepts of MINE - three aspects of time, ignorance, joint production, political responsibility and, power of judgment - are introduced to illustrate the MINE-approach by a concrete transformation problem, namely the river Emscher; which was the central sewer of the Ruhr area around 1900 and was completely renaturalized after several decades in 2020. In Part V, Malte Faber illustrates, again in the firstperson perspective, the orientation of MINE through three messages on transformation. In an addendum, Part VI, we critically comment on the five-before-twelve rhetoric that is widespread especially in discourses of climate protection.

This Dissertation is devoted to the empirical analysis of the consequences of government action. In particular, it investigates the distributional impact of fundamental tax reform and the welfare cost of bequest taxation. Further chapters assess the sustainability of public budgets in light of demographic change and the productivity impact of air pollution.

Over 300 government members have had the main responsibility for international development cooperation in 23 member countries of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee since the organization started reporting detailed Official Development Assistance (ODA) data in 1967. Understanding their role in foreign aid giving is crucial since their decisions might directly impact aid effectiveness and thus economic development on the ground. Our study examines whether development ministers' personal characteristics influence aid budgets and aid quality. To this end, we create a novel database on development ministers' gender, political ideology, prior professional experience in development cooperation, education in economics, and time in office over the 1967-2012 period. Results from fixed-effects panel regressions show that some of the personal characteristics of development ministers matter. Most notably, we find that more experienced ministers with respect to their time in office obtain larger aid budgets. Moreover, there is evidence that female ministers as well as officeholders with prior professional experience in development cooperation and a longer time in office provide higher-quality ODA.

Mit dem Thema "Globalisierung gestalten und gemeinsam gewinnen" beschäftigt sich die fünfte Alfred-Weber-Lecture, die am Mittwoch, 9. Dezember 2009, an der Universität Heidelberg stattfindet. Als Gastrednerin wird sich Prof. Dr. Gesine Schwan, ehemalige Präsidentin der Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), mit dieser Fragestellung im Spannungsfeld von Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Politik auseinandersetzen. Der Vortrag findet in der Aula der Alten Universität statt und beginnt um 18.15 Uhr. Ausgerichtet wird die öffentliche Veranstaltung vom Alfred-Weber-Institut für Wirtschaftswissenschaften. "Ausgehend von der aktuellen Wirtschaftskrise wird Gesine Schwan die brisante Frage nach einer tiefen Kulturkrise der globalisierten Gesellschaft stellen", so Prof. Dr. Andreas Irmen, Geschäftsführender Direktor des Alfred-Weber-Instituts, der die Lecture Ende des Jahres 2007 ins Leben gerufen hat. Der Heidelberger Professor für Wirtschaftspolitik: "Gesine Schwan gilt als eine der herausragenden Sozialwissenschaftlerinnen Deutschlands und als bedeutende Vordenkerin gesellschaftspolitischer Strömungen." Neben ihrer wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit engagiert sich Prof. Schwan aktiv in Politik und Gesellschaft. In den Jahren 2004 und 2009 kandidierte sie für das Amt der Bundespräsidentin. Mit der Lecture wirbt das Alfred-Weber-Institut auch für den vor drei Jahren gestarteten Heidelberger Bachelor-Studiengang "Economics (Politische Ökonomik)", der den Studierenden wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse sowie Erklärungsansätze benachbarter sozialwissenschaftlicher Disziplinen vermittelt. Die öffentliche Veranstaltungsreihe mit namhaften Referenten erinnert an den berühmten Heidelberger Nationalökonomen und Soziologen Alfred Weber (1868 bis 1958). Teil 1: Begrüßung und Einführung durch Prorektor Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Sonntag und Prof. Dr. Andreas Irmen, Geschäftsführender Direktor des Alfred-Weber-Instituts. Teil 2: Vortrag von Prof. Gesine Schwan Teil 3: Diskussion

Digital platforms already dominate the top 10 of the world's most valuable firms. The specific characteristics of their business model, such as quick growth and market power soon after market entry, have provoked public discourse. This paper analyzes digital platforms' business models, the reasons for their success and the challenges they present. Digital platforms offer an online forum for conducting transactions and therefore are able to dramatically reduce transaction costs, which creates value for platform users. Generally, digital platforms are aware of the high and increasing importance of data. By collecting and combining data from the different user groups, digital platforms are able to improve their service for existing users and to attract new user groups. Digital platforms' market power and their control over large, valuable sets of data have attracted the attention of regulatory authorities and led to investigations and fines. Economic policy should aim to protect consumers while still fostering the digital platform business model. ; Digitale Plattformen dominieren bereits heute die Top 10 der weltweit wertvollsten Unternehmen. Doch die spezifischen Merkmale des Plattformgeschäftsmodels, wie schnelles Wachstum und die damit erreichbare Marktmacht kurz nach Markteintritt, haben zu öffentlichen Diskussionen geführt. Die vorliegende IW-Analyse hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, die Grundlagen des Erfolgs von Plattformen und die damit einhergehenden Herausforderungen zu analysieren. Dabei wird unter einer digitalen Plattform ein webbasierter Intermediär verstanden, der Transaktionen zu stark reduzierten Kosten ermöglicht und dadurch einen Mehrwert für Kunden generiert. Digitale Plattformen sind sich zudem der wachsenden Bedeutung von Daten bewusst. Durch das Sammeln und Kombinieren von Daten verschiedener Nutzergruppen können sie ihre Leistungen für ihre Kunden verbessern und neue hinzugewinnen. Doch die Marktmacht digitaler Plattformen und ihr Zugriff auf große, wertvolle Datensätze haben bereits zu Untersuchungen, Verfahren und Strafen geführt. Ziel der Wirtschaftspolitik in diesem Zusammenhang sollte sein, die Konsumenten zu schützen und gleichzeitig Plattformen zu fördern.