infonet-economy

Many people believe that economists in general are more selfish than other people and that this greater selfishness is due to economics education. This paper offers empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set on giving behaviour in connection with two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economics education does not make people...

This paper analyzes the impact of the Austrian Regional Extended Benefit Program (REBP) on the labor market outcomes for elderly workers in Austria. The REBP extended entitlement to regular unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to a maximum of 209 weeks for elderly individuals in certain regions. This policy change created a large-scale quasi-experimental situation from which a lot can...

Auctions are generally not efficient when the object’s expected value depends on
private and common value information. We report a series of first-price auction
experiments to measure the degree of inefficiency that occurs with financially
motivated bidders. While some subjects fall prey to the winner’s curse, they
weigh their private and common value...

A new macroeconomic equilibrium theory is presented which gives a rigorous economic foundation of the notion of employability. Employability depends on the one side on the workers' interactive abilities, but on the other side also on the skill requirements implied by the organizational environment provided by firms. It is shown that the range of abilities which is considered as...

This paper shows that a small amount of individual-level money illusion may cause considerable aggregate nominal inertia after a negative nominal shock. In addition, our results indicate that negative and positive nominal shocks have asymmetric effects because of money illusion. While nominal inertia is quite substantial and long lasting after a negative shock, it is rather small...

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understandingnincentives, contracts and organisations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of human motivation may severely limit understanding the determinants and effects of incentives...

Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important insights for economics. We report how the economic variables income, unemployment and inflation...

"Moderne Ökonomie und Sozialpsychologie beschäftigen sich beide mit der Erklärung menschlichen Verhaltens. Dieser Artikel gibt eine Übersicht über die Interaktion zwischen den beiden Wissenschaften. Zum einen werden einige grundlegende Aspekte dieser Beziehung diskutiert; zum anderen werden die Ergebnisse neuerer empirischer Arbeiten dargestellt. Im Zentrum stehen Erweiterungen...

Globalization is often seen to result in a smaller (Liliput) or larger (Leviathan) state. But future public activity will be more flexible. Persons have multiple identities. They can be citizens of sub- and supra-national jurisdictions, semi- and non-governmental organizations and private units, even profit-oriented firms. Such attachment may be temporary, multiple or partial. To...