Der grosse österreichische Nationalökonom Josef Schumpeter hat die Öffentlichen Finanzen als die Nerven eines Staates bezeichnet. In ihnen spiegeln sich - wie in einem Fieberthermometer - die gesellschaftlichen, politischen, demographischen und ökonomischen Veränderungen, Umbrüche und Krisen in einer Volkswirtschaft wider. Angesichts der ablaufenden und zu erwartenden weiteren tief greifenden Umbrüche erscheint es wirtschaftspolitisch gleichermassen reizvoll wie notwendig, sich mit den mittel- und langfristigen Zukunftsperspektiven der Finanzierung öffentlicher Aufgaben auseinander zu setzen. Im vorliegenden Sammelband wird dazu eine Analyse von namhaften aus- und inländischen ÖkonomInnen vorgelegt. Thematisch beinhalten die Beiträge grundsätzliche Überlegungen zur Finanzierung öffentlicher Aufgaben, ausgewählte Aspekte der Regional- und Gemeindefinanzierung, ausgewählte Perspektiven der Finanzierung von Sozialleistungen und Finanzierungsperspektiven von Non-Profit-Organisationen.
Contests between groups are prone to intra-group externalities (free-riding). Yet,
costless incentive schemes that entirely avoid free-riding within a group might be undesirable, both individually and socially. In contests between two groups, a relatively weak (i.e., small or unproductive) group will optimally not implement them
because they compound differences in strength between groups. If the groups are of
relatively similar strengths, they are both worse off when they rein in their intra-group
externalities compared to a situation where they do not. If groups' strengths differ
sufficiently, the relatively strong group benefits at the expense of the relatively weak
one.
The private provision of public goods generally suffers from two types of efficiency failures: sorting problems (the wrong individuals contribute) and quantity problems (an inefficient amount is provided). Embedding the provision game into a contest that rewards larger contributions with higher probabilities of winning a prize may remedy such failures. Applications include tenure decisions at universities, electoral competition among politicians, etc. We identify a tradeoff between the value of the prize and the decisiveness of the contest. High-powered incentives in contests may cause an overprovision of the public good or wasteful participation of unproductive individuals in the contest.
This paper starts from the observation that in public-goods group contests, group impact can in general not be additively decomposed into some sum (of functions) of individual efforts. We use a CES-impact function to identify the main channels of influence of the elasticity of substitution on the behavior in and the outcome of such a contest. We characterize the Nash equilibria of this game and carry out comparative-static exercises with respect to the elasticity of substitution among group members' efforts. If groups are homogeneous (i.e. all group members have the same valuation and efficiency within the group), the elasticity of substitution has no effect on the equilibrium. For heterogeneous groups, the higher the complementarity of efforts of that group, the lower the divergence of efforts among group members and the lower the winning probability of that group. This contradicts the common intuition that groups can improve their performance by solving the free-rider problem via higher degrees of complementarity of efforts.
In an environment with asymmetric information and intragenerational externalities, the implementation of a first-best efficient Clarke-Groves-Vickrey mechanism may not be feasible if it has to be self-financing. By using intergenerational transfers, the arising budget deficit can be covered in every generation only if the initial allocation is not dynamically efficient. While introducing a pay-as-you-go scheme without addressing the externality already yields a Pareto improvement, further welfare gains can be captured by using the additional resources to achieve a perfect internalization.
