infonet-economy

It is a widely held belief that apprenticeship training represents a net investment for training firms, the cost of which needs to be recouped after the training period. A new firm-level data set for Switzerland reveals large variation in net costs across firms and, remarkably, negative net costs for 60 per cent of all firms. We use these data to estimate the effect of net costs on…

Mandating universal service requires the public to decide what services people should have and what prices they should pay. Postal services have traditionally been financed by charging the senders only, while recent steps in the liberalization of the postal sector forced policymakers to find a broader financial basis for postal services. The existence of a receiver externality, the…

Since Durkheim, sociological explanations of social cooperation emphasize the internalization of values that induce norm compliance. Since Adam Smith, economic explanations of social cooperation emphasize incentives that induce selfish individuals to cooperate. Here we develop a general approach – the Beliefs, Preferences, and Constraints approach – showing that each of the above…

Quality of life factors continue to gain importance in residential location decisions as well as location decisions of firms. One such factor is an attractive local landscape. The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of the empirical literature on the role of landscape amenities in local economic change. Following common amenity definitions, we define landscape amenities as…

This paper examines the link between financial reporting and corporate governance. Based on empirical examples of the recent confidence crisis in financial reporting and within an information economics framework, the fundamental case is being established. Then, the core elements of financial reporting are being presented. Based on an analysis of various international accounting…

We examine optimal taxation and social insurance with adverse selection in competitive insurance markets. In a previous literature, it has been shown that, with perfect insurance markets, social insurance improves welfare since it is able to redistribute without creating distortions. This result has been taken as robust to the introduction of adverse selection as this would only…

This paper studies the term structure implications of a simple structural economy in which the representative agent displays ambiguity aversion, modeled by Multiple Priors Recursive Utility. Bond excess returns reflect a premium for ambiguity, which is observationally distinct from the risk premium of affine yield curve models. The ambiguity premium can be large even in the simplest…

The residential built environment and the belonging values creation network consisting of several interdependent actors has not obtained much attention from the field of science. Even though much literature exists about the diffusion of innovations (e.g., Rogers 1995), the diffusion process of innovations in the residential building system is not fully understood. Hence, the enormous…