infonet-economy

This paper employs ICP expenditure data to investigate the relationship between income and product diversity. It turns out that per-capita income has a strong positive impact on the number of products consumed at a non-negligible level in a country, and a significant negative impact on the concentration of consumers' expenditure across different goods categories. Inequality in...

This study starts from the observation that today's Western trading nations are exposed to multiple risks of energy supplies, eg simultaneous shortage of oil and gas supplies. To cope with these risks, both oil and gas can be stockpiled. Adopting the viewpoint of a policy maker who aims at minimizing the expected cost of security of supply, optimal simultaneous adjustments of...

In current welfare state analysis there is little theory to explain the action of exclusive groups. This article explores the possibilities of a theory that focuses on the interaction between individual choices and strategies, the formal systems, policies and rules of governments and the informal norms and practices of groups. The argument is that club theory, a branch of public...

This paper explores the relation between non-exponential waiting times between events and the distribution of the number of events in a fixed time interval. It is shown that within this framework the frequently observed phenomenon of overdispersion, i.e. a variance that exceeds the mean, is caused by a decreasing hazard function of the waiting times, while an increasing hazard...

Key demographic variables, such as the number of children and the number of marriages or divorces, can only take integer values. This papers deals with the estimation of single equation models in which the counts are regressed on a set of observed individual characteristics such as age, gender, or nationality. Most empirical work in population economics has neglected the fact that...

The study introduces a distinction between two types of labor mobility: direct job to job changes (which are assumed to be voluntary) and job changes after experiencing an unemployment spell (assumed to be involuntary). Exploiting the close relationship between those two phenomena we adopt a bivariate regression framework for our empirical analysis of data on male individuals in the...

Abstimmungen als Mittel zur Entscheidungsfindung sind heute sehr verbreitet. Dass Abstimmungsergebnisse (aus logisch zwingenden Gründen) nicht in jedem Fall rational sein müssen, ist hingegen wenig bekannt. Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt an Hand theoretischer Berechnungen und praktischer Fallbeispiele aus der schweizerischen Politik, dass irrationale, sogenannt paradoxe Entscheide...