infonet-economy

The Motivation Crowding Effect suggests that external intervention via monetary incentives or punishments may undermine, and under different identifiable conditions strengthen, intrinsic motivation. As of today, the theoretical possibility of motivation crowding has been the main subject of discussion among economists. This study demonstrates that the effect is also of empirical...

Many of the most important choices in people's lives have an inter-temporal dimension, i.e., these choices are associated with a flow of benefits or costs that accrue in the future. In addition, such choices are frequently habit- forming. Yet, little is known about habit-forming inter-temporal choice behavior. This paper reports the results of an inter-temporal choice experiment...

The present paper analyzes the consequences of a consumption tax reform for the export sector. In particular, it offers an explanation why exporters support such a reform although economic theory basically predicts trade neutrality. To this purpose, the basic neoclassical model is replaced with two Keynesian assumptions, i.e. sticky wages and absence of perfect foresight. It is...

Based upon time series data published by PTT prior to regulatory reform, this paper investigates whether Swiss telecommunications qualify as a natural monopoly. Employing the subadditivity concept for multiproduct industries, alternative specifications of quadratic cost functions are estimated. The results of these estimations are ambiguous and demonstrate the difficulty of...

"Due to its formality and highly analytic thinking, economics is often attributed a leading role among the social sciences and a prominent position as contributor to economic or social issues in the real world. Fact is, however, that the empirical proof for such a claim is either missing or anecdotal. This paper aims to outline the “economics of economics”. It...

Michael Porter and others have recently argued that suitable environmental regulations are likely to induce cost-reducing innovations. We analyze under which conditions such arguments might be consistent with microeconomic analysis, and under which additional conditions the firms' benefits might exceed the costs. It turns out that this requires fairly specific conditions.

This article's point of departure is that the individual has to manage three stochastic assets, namely health, wealth, and wisdom (skills), which tend to be positively correlated. It shows that the unexpected components of insurance payments should be negatively correlated for minimizing total asset volatility. The empirical finding is that in the United States, Japan, and...

The author reports on a series of experiments designed to investigate the factor of incentive mechanisms in the case of private provisions of public goods. In the Control treatment, there was no mechanism so that subjects faced strong free-riding incentives. In the so-called Falkinger mechanism treatment, the author implemented the Falkinger mechanism. The studies explored the impact...

This article draws on a new data set that enables the authors to compare the distribution of income from employment across OECD countries. Specifically, the article conducts a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of the determinants of wage inequality in sixteen countries from 1973 to 1995. The analysis shows that varieties of capitalism matter. The authors find that the...