infonet-economy

This paper empirically examines the business-stealing effect of store entry in the Swiss grocery retail industry. A uniquely spatially detailed dataset of all Swiss retail stores and residents is constructed, that captures important drivers of demand and competition with great detail. I employ Entropy Balancing to control for systematic differences across local markets and provide...

Access to external funds is crucial for the entry and expansion of entrepreneurial firms and the sectors they predominantly arise in. This paper reports three important results. First, comparative advantage is shaped by factor endowments as well as fundamental determinants of corporate finance. In particular, a larger equity ratio of firms and tough governance standards relax...

Almost all important decisions in people’s lives entail risky consequences. Some of these decisions involve events that materialize with a low probability but lead to extreme consequences such as loss of total wealth or accidental death. When facing such rare extreme events, people display considerable risk aversion in some situations whereas in others the opposite is the case. For...

What if the statutory fiscal depreciation of buildings was higher than their effective economic depreciation? This would imply that markets would value buildings more than their social fundamental value. I prove that this would allow house price bubbles to emerge and open the door to sudden crashes. This paper provides an example of how a misaligned fiscal policy measure could...

Capital reallocation from unprofitable to profitable firms is a key source of productivity gain in an innovative economy. We present a model of credit reallocation and focus on the role of banks: Weakly capitalized banks hesitate to write off non-performing loans to avoid a violation of regulatory requirements or even insolvency. Such behavior blocks credit to expanding industries...

This paper evaluates the effects of awarding vouchers for vocational training on the employment outcomes of unemployed voucher recipients in Germany, as well as the potential mechanism through which they operate. This study assesses the direct effects of voucher assignment net of ac¬tual redemption, which may be driven by preference shaping and learning about possible human capital...

Ingo Pies (2016b) provides an engaging review of our article “Locating Responsibility” (see Kolmar/Beschorner 2016), published in one of the past issues of the zfwu. In his thoughtful comments, he discusses our suggestion of a multi-level approach in economic ethics against the background of his own ideas of “ordonomics”, which is an alternative conceptual framework that allows to...

We propose a general theoretical model of decision‐rights allocation and choice, formulated in the context of a dynamic psychological game. Decision rights are valued not only instrumentally, i.e. according to the expected utility associated with the achieved outcomes, but also intrinsically, i.e. according to the procedure by which outcomes are achieved. As such procedural...

Several European countries have recently introduced levies on bank liabilities to internalise the fiscal costs of banking crises. This paper studies the tax incidence: Building on the Monti-Klein model, we predict that banks shift the burden to borrowers by raising lending rates and that deposit rates may increase as deposits are partly exempt. Bank-level evidence for 23 EU countries...