Publications des institutions partenaires
Payment Evasion
This paper shows that a firm can use the purchase price and the fine imposed on detected payment evaders to discriminate between unobservable consumer types. Assuming that consumers self-select into regular buyers and payment evaders, we show that the firm typically engages in second-degree price discrimination in which the purchase price exceeds the expected fine. In addition, we...
Institution partenaire
English / 18/12/2017
Market Size and Entry in the Swiss Grocery Retail Industry
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...
Institution partenaire
/ 01/11/2017
Endogenous Growth, Semi-endogenous Growth... or Both? A Simple Hybrid Model
First generation endogenous growth models had the counterfactual implication that the long-term growth of per-capita GDP increased with the population size. Two influential growth paradigms, the semi-endogenous and the second generation fully endogenous, eliminated this strong scale effect. Both solutions have useful aspects and insights, but very different policy implications. This...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/05/2017
Access to Credit and Comparative Advantage
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/05/2017
A Tale of Two Tails: On the Coexistence of Overweighting and Underweighting of Rare Extreme Events
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...
Institution partenaire
/ 01/04/2017
A Tale of Two Tails: On the Coexistence of Overweighting and Underweighting of Rare Extreme Events
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...
Institution partenaire
/ 01/04/2017
Combining Semi-Endogenous and Fully Endogenous Growth: a Generalization.
This paper shows that combining the semi-endogenous and the fully endogenous growth mechanisms with a general CES aggregator, either growth process can prevail in the balanced growth path depending on their degree of complementarity/substitutability. Policy-induced long-run economic switches to the fully endogenous steady state as the R&D employment ratio surpasses a positive...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Depreciation: a Dangerous Affair
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
How much Keynes and how much Schumpeter? An Estimated Macromodel of the US Economy
The macroeconomic experience of the last decade stressed the importance of jointly studying the growth and business cycle fluctuations behavior of the economy. To analyze this issue, we embed a model of Schumpeterian growth into an estimated medium-scale DSGE model. Results from a Bayesian estimation suggest that investment risk premia are a key driver of the slump following the...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Schumpeterian Banks: Credit Reallocation and Capital Requirements
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/02/2017
Does it Pay to Work for Free? Negative Selection and the Wage Returns to Volunteer Experience.
This paper offers the first instrumental variables estimates of the wage returns to volunteer experience. The returns are substantial and differ considerably by gender. The results imply that the unequal valuation of volunteer experience by gender is more important in explaining the gender earnings gap than is the unequal valuation of part-time paid work experience. The results also...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Direct and indirect effects of training vouchers for the unemployed
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Sorting on the Used-Car Market After the Volkswagen Emission Scandal
The disclosure of the VW emission manipulation scandal caused a quasi-experimental market shock in the observable quality of VW diesel vehicles. We consider a classical model for adverse selection and sorting to derive an empirically testable hypothesis about the impact of observable quality on the supply of used cars. We test the hypothesis with data collected from an online car...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Locating Ordonomics
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 15/12/2016
Growth accounting and endogenous technical change.
This study explores growth accounting under endogenous technological progress. It is well known that the Solow approach overstates (understates) the contribution of capital accumulation (technological progress) to economic growth and that the Mankiw-Romer-Weil approach addresses this issue. However, we find that the Mankiw-Romer-Weil approach is inconsistent (consistent) with the lab...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2016
Decision rights: freedom, power, and interference
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2016
Banks and Sovereigns: A Model of Mutual Contagion
The recent crisis has revealed that bank and sovereign risks are inherently intertwined. This paper develops a model of the bank-sovereign nexus to identify the main spillovers and to study the implications of guarantees and capital regulation. We show how banks’ asset risk may trigger a sovereign default through taxation and deposit insurance. The latter can be contagious because of...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/08/2016
On the Incidence of Bank Levies: Theory and Evidence
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 14/04/2016
Locating Responsibility. An Extended Transaction Cost Approach
Institution partenaire
English / 02/04/2016
The finite sample performance of estimators for mediation analysis under sequential conditional independence
Using a comprehensive simulation study based on empirical data, this paper investigates the finite sample properties of different classes of parametric and semi-parametric estimators of (natural or pure) direct and indirect causal effects used in mediation analysis under sequential conditional independence assumptions. The estimators are based on regression, inverse probability...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/02/2016
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