infonet-economy

This paper is a selective survey of new or recent methods to extract information about market expectations from asset prices for monetary policy purposes. Traditionally, interest rates and forward exchange rates have been used to extract expected means of future interest rates, exchange rates and inflation. More recently, these methods have been refined to rely on implied forward…

The paper's objective is to interpret no-arbitrage conditions by means of linear programming. Basic statements about the term structure of a market with frictions can be derived using the relation of primal and associated dual programs. The duality concept applies mutatis mutandis to the valuation of cash flows from an individual investor's point of view.

This paper tests for the importance of non-pecuniary costs of unemployment using a longitudinal data-set on life-satisfaction of working-age men in Germany. We show that unemployment has a large detrimental effect on satisfaction after individual specific fixed effects are controlled for. The non-pecuniary effect is much larger than the effect that stems from the associated loss of…

The recent economic literature on the incidence of various forms of post-secondary on-the-job and off-the-job training in Germany and the United States, as well as on the effects of training on wages, inequality, and labor mobility is surveyed. Young workers in Germany receive substantially more company-based (apprenticeship) training than United States workers. In the United States…

The messenger paradigm is one of the earliest models which propose the exchange of code to implement computer communication. Code becomes mobile and mobile code is now considered a promising alternative for the implementation of distributed applications. One application of mobile code is in the implementation of software agents which themselves are used to implement complex…

In the present paper, relationships between embeddedness, power, control and innovation are examined in the context ofthe telecommunications sector. It is contended that in a tightly embedded, technology-intensive sector, technological and economic control are closeb intertwined. Consequently, the ability to appropriate economic rents is large& based on technological control. In…

We consider a regulator's choice between environmentally motivated emissions taxes and output taxes. We investigate how the optimal instrument depends on the monitoring cost function, the firm's technology, and on social preferences regarding output and environmental quality. Pure emissions taxes are usually not optimal with monitoring costs. Pure output taxes are optimal…

We review the use and the interpretation of some robustness concepts and techniques in some economic applications. We focus on estimation techniques in income distribution analysis and we discuss the reliability of inequality measures.

The incorporation of single-factor interest rate models within the stochastic programming methodology is investigated and applied to multiperiod investment. Barycentric approximation is used for discretizing the stochastic factors and for generating scenario trees which take the various term structure movements into account. It is shown that employing the Vasicek model for the…