infonet-economy

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…

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.

working report - Former investigation (Approximation of Profit-and-Loss Distributions, Part I) introduces the application of the barycentric approximation methodology for evaluating profit-and-loss distributions numerically. Although, convergence of the quantiles is ensured by the weak convergence of the discrete measures, as proclaimed in Part I, recent numerical results have…

Social movements can have an impact on institutions by aiming explicitly at institutional change or by pursuing policy goals. In the former situation, their chances of success depends on factors internal and external to the movements. In the latter situation, the contribution of policy-oriented movements to institutional reform can be seen as a by-product of their action. A process…

This paper proposes the following incentive scheme for the private provision of public goods: government should reward and penalize deviations from the mean contribution by an appropriate factor. This makes efficient contribution individually rational even if individuals see through the government budget constraint.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on native wage impacts of immigration. I propose a mobile-fixed factor distinction as a framework in which to think about the differential impact of immigration on various labor market groups. Skilled workers are treated as a fixed factor of production since the strong reliance on skill certification in Germany inhibits mobility and…

A new approach for modeling under-reported Poisson counts is developed. The parameters of the model are estimated by Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. An application to workers absenteeism data from the German Socio-Economic Panel illustrates the fruitfulness of the approach. Worker absenteeism and the level of pay are unrelated, but absence rates increase with firm size.