infonet-economy

This paper analyzes the impact of capacity costs on bidding strategies of firms participating in procurement auctions. More efficient firms will invest in advance due to their high probability of winning the auction while less efficient bidders prefer to wait with their investments until the outcome of the auction is known. However, in equilibrium both types of firms include a...

This paper examines costs in the Swiss nursing home industry, an issue of concern to Swiss policy makers because of the explosion of elderly care costs and the aging of the population. The paper considers estimation of a translog cost function employing panel data for a sample of 36 nonprofit nursing homes operating in Ticino, a canton of Switzerland, over the period 1993-1995. Using...

Explanations of protest policing have neglected the "spotlight of the media." Based on data on repression and its media coverage in four Swiss cities from 1965 to 1994, our findings suggest that the mass media do have an impact on levels and forms of repression, along with political opportunity dimensions and levels of disruption. We identify two mechanisms. First, we show...

We show how a collection of results in the literature on the empirical estimation of welfare indicators from sample data can be unified. We also demonstrate how some of these ideas can be extended to empirically important cases where the data have been trimmed or censored.

In this paper we discuss the institutional setting, both cultural and political, for the claim-making of immigrants and ethnic minorities and derive a number of hypotheses regarding variations in the extent, forms, and content of claim-making. The general underlying idea is that the political-institutional setting shapes the modalities of claim-making, while the cultural-...

We consider a simple class of dynamic games. A continuum of players chooses between two actions (“locations”) in each period; per-period payoffs depend positively on the number of players choosing the same action. The resulting dynamics are investigated. If one location receives a favorable shock, the effects of the strength of externalities and the heterogeneity of the population on...

In der Sozialversicherung gelten Risikoselektionen als unerwuenscht, weil sie die Gefahr mit sich bringen, dass der einheitliche Risikopool in der Sozialversicherung aufgespalten und die sozialpolitisch gewuenschten Umverteilungsstroeme zwischen den Versicherten reduziert werden. Der Beitrag zeigt am Beispiel der sozialen Krankenversicherung in der Schweiz und der Bundesrepublik...

The macro evidence of increased adjustment pressure since the early 1970s suggests that job mobility should have increased. Hence, retrospective and spell data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are combined in order to test the hypothesis that job stability for German workers declined between 1974 and 1994. Using count data regression models in which we control for labour market...

Attachment of wage as a way for creditors to enforce payment by unwilling or insolvent debtors is not very successful in several countries. Based on a dynamic model of debtor behaviour, this paper explores two alternatives of reform. One is to reduce the rate of attachment, which at present amounts to 100 percent of the wage income exceeding the subsistence level, thus probably...