infonet-economy

In this paper we focus on the handling by the police of mass demonstrations in Switzerland during the past three decades. Our aim is to single out the determinants of police intervention during these protest events. We look at three sets of potential causes: (1) the configuration of power (i.e. political alliances and coalitions), (2) face-to-face interactions between protesters and…

From Contention to Democracy addresses a crucial aspect of contemporary societies: the role of social movements for political and social change. The volume gathers together essays written by prominent social theorists who have been asked to reflect on the relationship between movements and processes of social, political and cultural change. Three broad types of movement-change nexus…

We review the use and the interpretation of some robustness concepts and techniques in some economic applications. We focus on estimation techniques in income distribution analysis and we discuss the reliability of inequality measures.

What does it mean to be moral ? What does it mean to be a moral political man ? This contribution takes Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development as the analytical frame to answer these questions. Based on the writings of Vaclav Havel, political dissident and then first president of the postcommunist Tchecoslovakian Republic, our study displays how emblematic a moral man…

Contrary to what is usually implied by work on the relationship between political opportunity structures and social movements, political institutions are not a general setting offering or denying formal access and political opportunities to every challenge, but rather favor certain types of movements and constrain others. This process of institutional selectivity depends on the…

In this paper the transfer problem is analysed in a three country, three commodity (including one non-traded good) trade model where two countries belong to a customs union. The three countries A, B and C each produce three goods and engage in an asymmetric pattern of trade. Countries A and B form a customs union and C remains outside the union. Several results are obtained.…

In this paper we compute the IF of a general class of estimators for grouped data, namely the class of MPE. We find that this IF can be large although it is bounded. Therefore, we propose a more general class of estimators, the MGP-estimators, which include the class of estimators based on the power divergence statistic and permits to define robust estimators. By analogy with Hampel…

This study analyses first the impact of various income sources on overall income inequality in Switzerland in 1980, on the basis of the Income and Wealth Survey which was conducted during that year. The specific effect of each of these income sources is analyzed separately for male- and female-headed households and an attempt is made to also determine their role in explaining the…