infonet-economy

"This paper examines the impact of a public credit registry on the repayment behavior of borrowers. We implement an experimental credit market in which loannrepayment is not third-party enforceable. We compare market outcome with a credit registry to that without a credit registry. This experiment is conducted forntwo market environments: first a market in which interactions…

We propose an a±ne term structure model which accommodates non-linearities in the drift andnvolatility function of the short-term interest rate. Such non-linearities are a consequence of discrete beta-distributed regime shifts constructed on multiple thresholds. We derive iterative closed-form formulanfor the whole yield curve dynamics that can be estimated using a linearized Kalman…

The main interest of this paper is to compare the value of education systems of differentncountries. For this reason I use data on workers who have completed their education beforenimmigrating to Switzerland to estimate a country specific return to education. I estimatenthe standard Mincer-equation with the extension that I additionally allow for country specific returns to education…

We analyze the factors that influence the support for environmental policy proposals. Swiss referendum data show that proposals obtain more yes-votes if they do not restrict consumption possibilities directly, if they are endorsed by business associations, if environmental preferences are strong and economic conditions are favorable at the time of the referendum. Also, there are more…

The conventional parameterizations of cumulative prospect theory do not explain the St. Petersburg paradox. To do so, the power coefficient of an individual’s utility function must be lower than the power coefficient of an individual’s probability weighting function.

Many people contribute to public goods but stop doing so once they experience free riding.We test the hypothesis that groups whose members know that they are composed only of "likeminded" cooperators are able to maintain a higher cooperation level than the most cooperative, randomly composed groups. Our experiments confirm this hypothesis. We also predict that groups of…

We discuss regression models for ordered responses, such as ratings of bonds, schooling attainment, or measures of subjective well-being. Commonly used models in this context are the ordered logit and ordered probit regression models. They are based on an underlying latent model with single index function and constant thresholds. We argue that these approaches are overly restrictive…

Risk management and asset pricing benefit from simple functional descriptions of the distribution of real asset returns. Recently, several authors have proposed that asset returns in real stock markets are distributed according to a hyperbolic distribution. While asset returns are generated by trades over time, the natural question is: What does economic theory imply concerning…

Right-wing extremism is a serious problem in many societies. A prominent hypothesis states that unemployment plays a crucial role for the occurrence of right-wing extremist crime. In this paper we empirically test this hypothesis. We use a previously not used data set which includes all officially recorded right-wing criminal acts in Germany. These data are recorded by the German…