Author: Jascha Grübel
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PE: Institutions and Economic principles
The main reference for today will be Mueller’s Public Choice III Chapter 1 and 2 (Mueller, 2003)as well as Acemoglu’s Political Economy Lecture Notes Chapter 1 (Acemoglu, 2009). Additional readings are Acemoglu’s Chapter 2 and work by Ostrom (Ostrom, 1998) and Schnellenbach (Schnellenbach & Schubert, 2015). Political Economy joins the fields of Political Science and Economics.…
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Urban Design I: Tools
Throughout the course Urban Design I several “tools” were introduced that impact urbanity. Expansion Tools of this kind belong to top-down approaches and usually give form to the urbanscape in a radical way. Megascale-planing (Berlin) Berlin was an early example of a politically motivated re-organisation of administrative units. Berlin grew from nearly 2 million to…
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PIPP: Governance beyond the state
International politics differentiate themselves from state politics as the question of sovereignty is answered differently. States have internal and external sovereignty. A consequence is that they are formally equal entities. Therefore states have to coordinate horizontally and negotiate an order mostly based on the power they can display. International politics would be similar to national…
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PIPP: Democracy & Governance
Mechanistic institutional definitions of a democracy are based on the electoral systems and the powers it hands to officials. There are also soft definitions of democracy that focus on citizens’ rights to form interest groups (pressure groups, political parties, etc.) and judicial protection of citizens. The quality of a democracy can be rated based on…
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Principles of Economics: Imperfect Competition
Monopoly Barriers to entry are the fundamental cause for the rise of monopoly. Barriers appear in three forms: ownership of key resources, exclusive production rights and an efficient (return-to-)scale. A firm’s ability to influence the market price is called market power. It entails that a firm can raise the price above some competitive level in…
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QPAM: Uncertainty
A first form of uncertainty is randomness. It is a stochastic behaviour that can be dealt with sensitivity analysis, estimates from experience (actuarial) or hedging. A more complicated form of uncertainty is indeterminacy. It describes situations that are qualitatively known, but cannot be reliably quantified. It is often addressed by attempting to quantify it anyway…
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Principles of Economics: Public and Common Goods
To define Public Goods we need two concepts: Excludable goods and Rival goods. Excludable goods can be prevented from use (food) in contrast to non-excludable goods that can always be consumed (radio or air). Rival goods cannot be consumed without diminishing others’ use of it (food) in contrast to non-rival goods (mp3-files). Based on the…