infonet-economy

We provide a direct test of the impact of altruism on remittances. From a sample of Indian migrant workers in Qatar, we elicit the propensity to share with others from their responses in a dictator game and use it as a proxy for altruism. For the entire sample, we find that altruism does not seem to matter. However, we document a strong positive relationship between altruism and…

We discuss a number of issues addressed in the volume. In particular, after an introduction about the capacity for resilience shown by European citizens, we summarize the volume’s content in terms of the economic crisis posing constraints to citizens, but also as opening up opportunities for change. Additionally, we discuss the intertwining of the economic and the political…

This paper investigates the effct of domestic market size on innovation activities across different durable good industries in the Chinese manufacturing sector. We address the endogeneity of market size by an IV strategy, based on a measure of potential market size, which is driven only by changes in the Chinese income distribution. This measure is exogenous to changes in prices and…

This volume presents evidence-based research on citizens’ experiences and reactions to the Great Recession in Europe. How did European citizen experience and react to the crisis? How are the experiences of crisis and political responses socially differentiated? Are some social classes and more deprived groups particularly hard hit? How did the crisis impact on political choices? What…

We analyze social mobility of decennial citizenry cohorts of Zurich born between 1780 and 1870. We categorize individuals according to their occupations and use different measures to show the level, change, and components of intergenerational mobility. Mobility was imperfect and weakly decreasing over time. Both level and change are driven by intergenerational persistence of…

We exploit Italian law DPR 81/2009, which determines class composition, as an instrument to identify the causal effect of grouping students of different grades into a single class (multigrading) on children cognitive achievement. This article focuses on 7-year-old students—those at the beginning of their formal education. Results suggest that attendance in multigrade classes versus…

The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven sciences. The access to, compilation and preparation of data from the programmable web for statistical analysis can, however, involve substantial up-front costs for the practical researcher. The R-package RWebData provides a high-level framework that allows data to be easily collected from the…

Using properties of the cdf of a random variable defined as a saddle-type point of a real valued continuous stochastic process, we derive first-order asymptotic properties of tests for stochastic spanning w.r.t. a stochastic dominance relation. First, we define the concept of Markowitz stochastic dominance spanning, and develop an analytical representation of the spanning property.…

Members of Parliament (MPs) request policy evaluations and use the resultant findings to inform law-making and hold the government to account. Since most elected representatives have developed strong ties to interest groups, one might wonder whether these privileged relationships influence MPs' parliamentary behavior. This study investigates how MPs' affiliations to groups…