infonet-economy

Most previous studies on intertemporal labor supply found very small or insignificantnsubstitution effects. It is not clear, however, whether these results are due to institutionalnconstraints on workers’ labor supply choices or whether the behavioral assumptions of thenstandard life cycle model with time separable preferences are empirically invalid. We conducted a randomized field...

Much progress has been made in recent years on developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on subjective well-being. In this paper we explore whether this new type of measurement can be fruitfully applied to the study of interdependent utility in general, and altruism between parents and adult children who moved away from home in particular. We...

We examine the effect of single motherhood on children’s secondary school track choice using 12-year-old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between single motherhood and children’s educational attainment. Looking for alternative explanations for this correlation, we use...

Looking back over the first four years of negotiation of the Doha Round this paper identifies and discusses a number of factors that are shaping negotiations among WTO members as they try to fulfil the development mandate for this multilateral trade negotiation. These factors are not just diplomatic in nature, indeed many relate to changes in how many view the potential impact of...

After presenting casual evidence of the difference between economists and the rest of the population, I review the survey and experimental evidence on this topic during the last 20 years. I then ask whether these results are applicable to real world situations. To consider this, examples of referenda results in Switzerland are presented where the citizens decided against...

The admittance of amicus curiae briefs in the US-Shrimp/Turtle dispute in 1998 stirred a debate among WTO Member States whether the dispute settlement procedure should be accessible for private individuals and entities. Developing countries firmly opposed the inclusion of amid curiae into the Disupute Settlement Understanding (DSU) and repeated their arguments frequently in cases...

Where should one begin with a design for the self-control of social systems? That is the question addressed by this paper. The traditional concepts of control reset on the feedback loop; control is essential to the attainment of goals. However, the simple feedback loop is insufficient for the modeling of a control system for an organization or other social system. For those systems,...

Naturkatastrophen wie Erdbeben sind typische Risiken mit einer geringen Wahrscheinlichkeit, das Schadenausmass jedoch kann riesig sein. In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten sind Schäden aus Erdbeben sowohl in der Häufigkeit wie auch im Ausmass gestiegen. Da Erdbeben ein seltenes Ereignis darstellen, besteht zudem ein mangelndes Interesse an Investitionen in präventive Massnahmen und...

We consider a regulator providing deposit insurance to a bank with private information about its investment portfolio. As typical in practice, we assume that the regulator does not commit to auditing afternany risk report from the bank. We first show that the optimal contract can be implemented through a direct revelation mechanism. We also show that, at the optimal contract, a high...