infonet-economy

This paper examines two competing explanations for workers' absenteeism, the shirking hypothesis and the adjustment-to-equilibrium hypothesis. Data on German workers for 1985-88 from the German SocioEconomic Panel are used in order to estimate the determinants of workers' absenteeism. The results indicate that firm size matters after wage effects are controlled for. This…

This paper analyses the effects of taxation and subsidies in an economy with private provision of a public good. It is shown that in a situation where all individuals contribute, taxation affects the equilibrium allocation if and only if at least one individual's voluntary contribution to the public good has an impact on the aggregate tax payments of the others. We then consider…

Explanations of protest policing have neglected the "spotlight of the media." Based on data on repression and its media coverage in four Swiss cities from 1965 to 1994, our findings suggest that the mass media do have an impact on levels and forms of repression, along with political opportunity dimensions and levels of disruption. We identify two mechanisms. First, we show…

We show how a collection of results in the literature on the empirical estimation of welfare indicators from sample data can be unified. We also demonstrate how some of these ideas can be extended to empirically important cases where the data have been trimmed or censored.

Not available in German. Retraining the labor force to match the demands of a modern economy is an important task during the transition process from a centrally planned to a market economy. This need is particular pressing in East Germany, because the transition process is much faster there than in the rest of Eastern Europe. Therefore, substantial resources are devoted to this…

Macro models of monetary policy typically involve forward looking behavior. Except in rare circumstances, we have to apply some numerical method to find the optimal policy and the rational expectations equilibrium. This paper summarizes a few useful methods, and shows how they can be combined with a Kalman filter to estimate the deep model parameters with maximum likelihood.…