infonet-economy

This paper measures and decomposes the differences in earnings distributions between public sector and private sector employees in Germany for the years 1984-2000. Two decomposition methods are used: Oaxaca decomposition using quantile regression and the decomposition proposed by Machado and Mata (2002). Both indicate that the public sector wage premium is highest at the lower end of…

Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding.We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of "likeminded" cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly composed groups. Our experiments confirm this hypothesis. We also predict that groups of…

The effective market access granted to textiles and apparel under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is estimated, taking into account the presence of rules of origin. First, estimates are provided of the effect of tariff preferences combined with rules of origin on the border prices of Mexican final goods exported to the United States and of U.S. intermediate goods…

This paper reports panel gravity estimates of aggregate bilateral trade for 130 countries over the period 1962-96 in which the coefficient of distance is allowed to change over time. In a standard specification in which transport costs are proxied by distance only, it is found paradoxically that the absolute value of the elasticity of bilateral trade to distance has been…

We report survey and experimental evidence on trust and voluntary cooperation from more than 630 non-student and student participants in rural and urban Russia. Our subjects have a diverse socioeconomic background that we relate to the answers of a survey on trust attitudes and to contribution behavior in a one-shot public goods game. We find that the socio-economic background…

Diskussionspapier, Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung, Universität St. Gallen#### The HIV/AIDS epidemic is a major public health threat, with evidence showing that information campaigns are effective policy tools to control its evolution. Many of these are designed to increase children's knowledge on HIV before they become sexually active or start to experiment with intravenous…

The aim of this paper is (i) to assess the impact of regional agreements on members’ trade in Sub-Saharan Africa (intra-regional trade as well as trade with the rest of the world), controlling for the other traditional determinants and (ii) to compare the respective effect of the preferential trade agreements and the currency unions. Considering the period 1962–96, we first assess…