Volume 12, Issue 3

To detect manipulations or fraud in accounting data, auditors have successfully used Benford’s law as part of their fraud detection processes. Benford’s law proposes a distribution for first digits of numbers in naturally occurring data. Government accounting and statistics are similar in nature to financial accounting. In the European Union (EU), there is pressure to comply with the Stability and Growth Pact criteria. Therefore, like firms, governments might try to make their economic situation seem better. In this paper, we use a Benford test to investigate the quality of macroeconomic data relevant to the deficit criteria reported to Eurostat by the EU member states. We find that the data reported by Greece shows the greatest deviation from Benford’s law among all euro states.

This paper investigates revenue sharing in an asymmetric two-teams contest model of a sports league with Nash behavior of team owners. The innovation of the analysis is that it focuses on the role of the contest success function (CSF). In case of an inelastic talent supply, revenue sharing turns out to worsen competitive balance regardless of the shape of the CSF. For the case of an elastic talent supply, in contrast, the effect of revenue sharing on competitive balance depends on the specification of the CSF. We fully characterize the class of CSFs for which revenue sharing leaves unaltered competitive balance and identify CSFs ensuring that revenue sharing renders the contest closer.

The paper analyzes the relation between monetary uncertainty and government incentives to implement economic reforms in order to reduce structural distortions and make economies more flexible. It is shown that uncertainty about the central bank’s behavior leads to more reforms. I relate this result to the debate about central bank structure in a larger European monetary union.

The process of globalization has an important impact on national tax policies. Most of the literature does not focus directly on the political decision-making process and assumes that the desired tax policy is responding to objective underlying tradeoffs. Based on an original survey of members of the German national parliament (Bundestag) in 2006/07, we document a strong ideological bias among policy-makers with respect to the perceived mobility of international tax bases (real capital and paper profits). Ideology also influences, directly and indirectly, the perceived national autonomy in tax setting and preferences for a European Union minimum tax for companies. There seems little consensus as to what the efficiency costs of capital taxation in open economies are, even though our survey falls in a period of extensive debate about, and actual adoption of, a company tax reform bill in Germany.

This paper is the first to provide a micro-level analysis of the impact of intercity rail connections on property prices. We use the variation in mainline accessibility provided by the reorganization of the rail system in post-unification Berlin to isolate accessibility effects from correlated individual location effects. Evidence does not support the existence of localized effects on location productivity and household utility. While the city, since unification, has undergone significant changes in its spatial structure, these effects cannot be attributed to the new transport concept. Our findings question the justification for committing substantial public funds to downtown rail redevelopment projects.

We provide empirical evidence on the degree and characteristics of price stickiness in Austria by estimating the average frequency of price changes and the duration of price spells from a large dataset of individual price records collected for the computation of the Austrian consumer price index. The mean (median) duration of price spells in Austria amounts to 14 (11) months, but there is considerable heterogeneity across sectors and products. We find that price increases occur only slightly more often than price decreases. For both directions, the average magnitude of price changes is quite large (11% and 14%, respectively). The introduction of the euro cash in January 2002 led to more frequent but, on average, smaller price adjustments than usual. Estimating the probability of a price change in a panel probit model, we find a small but positive effect of the price spell duration on the incidence of price changes. Furthermore, product-specific inflation, the size and the sign of the last price change and the period of the euro introduction significantly affect the probability of a price change.

In the present work we extend Diamond’s OLG model by allowing for endogenous fertility and look at the consequences of such an extension on the rules for optimal public debt issuing. In particular, we show that the condition according to which the rate of growth of population should be higher than the interest rate is no longer sufficient for obtaining welfare improvements via debt increases and that the level of optimal debt is, ceteris paribus, lower than the one arising with exogenous fertility. Finally, a sensitivity analysis shows that the optimal level of debt is higher the lower the capital share, the higher individuals’ degree of patience, the bigger the child-rearing cost and the lower the preference for children. On policy grounds we argue that debt-tightening policies may be optimal in the long run provided that the cost of rearing children does not increase (or, if anything, does decrease).