infonet-economy

This paper analyzes the causal relationships between marriage and subjective well-being in a longitudinal data set spanning 17 years. We find evidence that more happy singles opt more likely for marriage and that there are large differences in the benefits from marriage between couples. Potential, as well as actual, division of labor seems to contribute to spouses' well-being,…

"The optimal contest architecture for symmetric imperfectly discriminating contests isnshown to be generically the two-stage tournament (rather than the one-stage contest). In the first stage the contestants compete in several parallel divisions for the right to participate in the secondnstage. In the second stage the short-listed finalists compete for the prize. Given a…

Objectives - Preferences of both Alzheimer patients and their spouse caregivers are related to a willingness-to-pay (WTP) measure which is used to test for the presence of mutual (rather than the conventional one-way) altruism. Methods - Identical contingent valuation interviews were conducted in 2000 - 2002 for 126 Alzheimer patients and their caregiving spouses living in the Zurich…

This paper investigates the dynamic consequences of demographic change and various pension reform scenarios for Austria. The analysis is based on a computable overlapping-generations model with life-cycle labor supply, savings, and search unemployment. The public sector is decomposed into general government and an unfunded pension system with a tax - benefit linkage. Our quantitative…

In this numerical analysis of models for valuing employee stock options, the focus is on the impact of a model on the resulting option prices and the sensitivity of pricing differences between models with respect to changes in the parameters. For most models, the price reduction relative to standard options is uniquely determined by the expected life of the option. In fact, with the…

People spend more and more time commuting and often find it a burden.nAccording to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated eithernon the labor or on the housing market so that individuals' utility is equalized. However, inna direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we find that people with longerncommuting time report systematically lower…

A natural conjecture is that speculative trade disappears when individual beliefs become correct through learning. Sandroni in [22] gives a counterexample in an economy with sunspots. We generalizenSandroni's result by showing that the conjecture holds for economies with complete markets only. We consider a standard finite-horizon General Equilibrium model with complete markets…

There are at least two reasons why multiple prizes can be optimal in symmetric imperfectly discriminating contests. First, the introduction of multiple prizes reduces the standard deviation of contestants' effort in asymmetric equilibria, when the majority of contestants actively participate in competition. Second, the introduction of multiple prizes may increase the aggregate (…

Prochaska and colleagues'(e.g., Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992) stages-of-change theory was employed in the current study to reconceptualize the assessment of motivation to learn. We used the stages-of-change framework to develop and test a multidimensional measure of learning motivation using 3 independent samples. The pattern of relationships among the learning…