---

This book addresses the importance of local public expenditures for cultural activities and their impact as well as experimental studies on public activities. It consists of four contributions with different foci.
The first chapter investigates the relationship between private and public cultural activities using data for 414 municipalities in Hesse between 1998 and 2006. Above that, the further determinants of private cultural activities are analysed. The second chapter investigates the importance of the cultural infrastructure for the regional economic growth empirically. Therefore, Richard Florida´s theory of the creative class is used, which can explain the link between cultural infrastructure and economic growth. This influence is tested with a data set of the 73 independent German cities between 1997 and 2007. The third chapter investigates the motives of pro-social behavior in collective decisions in an economic experiment. It compares individual behavior in private and in collective decisions in a unified experimental setup. The fourth chapter shows that it may be useful to employ additional data analysis tools in tax compliance experiments to gain better statistical confidence on the results and to retrieve more information from the data sets, respectively.

---