Publications des institutions partenaires
A Further Look at Two-way Network Competition in Telecommunications
This paper develops a simple reduced form model of two-way network competition with linear retail pricing. Using the techniques of supermodular games, it is demonstrated that the most important results from the existing literature do not depend on routinely invoked assumptions, such as specific functional forms or the symmetry of the network operators. In particular, it is...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2000
Is Swiss Telecommunications a Natural Monopoly? An Evaluation of Empirical Evidence
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2000
Firm-Specific Training: Consequences for Job Mobility
This paper analyzes the impact of formal training on worker mobility. Using data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey, we find that on-the-job search activities and, to a smaller extent, actual job separations are significantly affected by both employer-provided and general training. Moreover, while the separation probability of searching workers is strongly affected by previous firm-...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2000
Does Economics have an Effect? Towards an Economics of Economics
"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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/02/2000
When do firms benefit from environmental regulations? A simple microeconomic approach to the Porter controversy
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.
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
Seemingly unrelated negative binomial regression
This paper discusses the specification and estimation of seemingly unrelated multivariate count data models. A new model with negative binomial marginals is proposed. In contrast to a previous model based on the multivariate Poisson distribution, the new model allows for over-dispersion, a phenomenon that is frequently encountered in economic count data. Semi-parametric estimation is...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
Criteria for the future division of labor between private and social health insurance
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
Learning for employment, innovating for growth
We present a model in which workers must be educated to get a good job and firms must innovate in order to increase productivity. Education as well as innovation and production require skilled labor as inputs. This, together with the fact that learning opportunities differ across workers, determine simultaneously the long-run level of skilled employment and the long-run rate of...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
A simple mechanism for the efficient provision of public goods: experimental evidence
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
Education, Educational Policy and Growth
This paper reviews the recent theoretical and empirical literature that relates education to growth, and draws some lessons for the Swedish experience. First, the “human capital accumulation” approach is discussed: agents decide, at each moment of their lives, to forego time or resources to improve their future productivity. The quality of the educational system is argued to be a...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
Chess-like games are dominance solvable in at most two steps
We show that strictly competitive, finite games of perfect information that may end in one of three possible ways can be solved by applying only two rounds of elimination of dominated strategies.
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
“Yes men”, integrity, and the optimal design of incentive contracts
In a pioneering approach towards the explanation of the phenomenon of “yes man” behavior in organizations, Prendergast [American Economic Review 83 (1993) 757–770] argued that incentive contracts in employment relationships generally make a worker distort his privately acquired information. This would imply that there is a trade-off between inducing a worker to exert costly effort...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
Inequality, Redistribution, and Economic Growth
This paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on inequality and growth. After discussing historical and more recent distributional trends as well as empirical evidence on the relationship between inequality and growth, I focus on recent explanations of the inequality-growth puzzle. I consider both the impact of the functional and the personal distribution on long-run...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
Is there a Golden Rule for the Stochastic Solow Growth Model?
This paper analyzes the dependence of average consumption on the saving rate in a one-sector neoclassical Solow growth model with production shocks and stochastic rates of population growth and depreciation where arbitrary ergodic processes are considered. The long-run behavior of the stochastic capital intensity and hence average consumption is uniquely determined by a random fixed...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2000
Managerial Power and Compensation
According to the widely used Managerial Power Model, a higher hierarchical position with associated higher power leads to higher compensation. In contrast, the Compensating Wage Differentials Model argues that there is a non-positive relationship between positional power and total compensation. Both power and income yield utility and in equilibrium managers are prepared to trade-off...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/12/1999
Ecological Tax Reform with Exemptions for the Export Sector in a two Sector two Factor Model
This present paper analyzes an energy tax reform that exempts the energy-intensive export sector from paying the energy tax and uses the additional revenue to cut existing taxes in all sectors. To that end, a two sector two factor model of an open economy that is small on the import side but not on the export side is applied. Within this model, an equivalence between a tax reform...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/12/1999
Business Cycle Phenomena in Overlapping Generations Economies with Stochastic Production
This paper analyzes economic fluctuations in an overlapping generations economy with productive capital in which random shocks in aggregate productivity are present. Under specific assumptions we obtain an explicit solution of the model. Applying random dynamical systems theory, we can prove that the long-run behavior of the economy is uniquely described by an asymptotically stable...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/12/1999
Outcome, Process & Power in Direct Democracy
Based on survey data for Switzerland, new empirical findings on direct democracy are presented. In the first part, we show that, on average, public employees receive lower financial compensation under more direct democratic institutions. However, top bureaucrats are more constrained in direct democracies and have to be compensated by higher wages for that loss of power. In the second...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/1999
Motivation, Knowledge Transfer, and Organizational Forms
"Employees are motivated intrinsically as well as extrinsically. Intrinsic motivation is crucial when tacit knowledge in and between teams must be transferred. Organizational forms enable different kinds of motivation and have different capacities to generate and transfer tacit knowledge. Since knowledge generation and transfer are essential for a firm’s sustainable...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/1999
External spillovers, internal spillovers and the geography of production and innovation
We consider a three-location duopoly model such that (i) firms choose production and innovation locations before (Bertrand) competition takes place and (ii) there are internal and external knowledge spillovers. We show: (1) agglomerations where firms earn negative profits may exist when there are both external and internal knowledge spillovers; (2) greater external spillovers do not...
Institution partenaire
English / 08/10/1999
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