infonet-economy

With the fast pace of globalization and knowledge-driven economy, the notion of trust in intra- and/or trans-organizational relations has attracted enormous attention both in academic research and business practices. It has been recognized that trust as a central mechanism
within and between organizations plays a crucial role for economic performance. Trust relationship at…

Luca Taschini outlines how collaboration between the academic and the business world has helped one company in the cement industry to tackle the EU emissions trading scheme.

The ability to share the other’s feelings, known as empathy, has recently become the focus of social neuroscience studies. We review converging evidence that empathy with, for example, the pain of another person, activates part of the neural pain network of the empathizer, without first hand pain stimulation to the empathizer’s body. The amplitude of empathic brain responses is…

A standard method to elicit certainty equivalents is the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) procedure. We compare the standard BDM procedure and a BDM procedure with a restricted range of minimum selling prices that an individual can state. We find that elicited prices are systematically affected by the range of feasible minimum selling prices. Expected utility theory cannot explain these…

We study alternative institutional arrangements for the determination of monetary policy in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents,nwhere monetary policy has redistributive effects. Inflation is determined by a policy board using either simple-majority voting, supermajority voting, ornbargaining. We compare the equilibrium inflation rates to the first-best allocation…

This paper deals with the compensation for non-fatal accident risk in Switzerland and presents empirical estimates of the value of a statistical injury. We approach the problem of endogenous sorting of workers into jobs with different accident risks based on unobserved productivity differences twofold. First, we have access to the number of accidents not only at the level of…

Risk aversion is traditionally defined in the context of lotteries over monetary payoffs. This paper extends the notion of risk aversion to a more general setup where outcomes (consequences) may not be measurable in monetary terms and people may have fuzzy preferences over lotteries, i.e. they may choose in a probabilistic manner. The paper considers comparative risk aversion within…

Depending on the definition of the tax base, the statutory corporate tax rate implies rather different measures of effective average and marginal tax rates. This paper develops a model of a monopolistically competitive industry with extensive and intensive business investment and shows how these margins respond to changes in average and marginal corporate tax rates. Intensive…