infonet-economy

"People behave pro-socially in a wide variety of situations that standard economic theory is unable to explain. Social comparison is one explanation for such pro-social behavior: people contribute if others contribute or cooperate as well. This paper tests social comparison in a field experiment at the University of Zurich. Each semester every single student has to decide…

In the past there was hardly any use of economic instruments in environmental policy, mainly command and control measures were used. More recently, ecological taxes as well as tradable permits became more popular and voluntary agreements have been implemented. Using the Public Choice approach we ask for the reasons of this wider acceptance of economic instruments. We conclude that…

Intertemporal models of the current account generally assume that global shocks do not affect the current account. We use this assumption to identify global and country-specific shocks in a bivariate VAR of output and the current account. Cross-country evidence from the G7 economies suggests that this identification works surprisingly well. We then employ our method to collect…

Business students are portrayed as behaving too egoistically. The critics call for more socialnresponsibility and good citizenship behavior on the part of business students. We present evidence ofnpro-social behavior in business students. Every student at the University of Zurich has to decide eachnsemester whether he/she wants to contribute to two social funds administrated by the…

Field evidence suggests that agents belonging to the same group tend to behave similarly,ni.e., behavior exhibits social interaction effects. Testing for such effects raises severenidentification problems. We conduct an experiment that avoids these problems. The mainndesign feature is that each subject simultaneously is a member of two randomly assigned andneconomically identical…

"Happiness research in economics takes reported subjective well-being as a proxynmeasure for utility and has already provided many interesting insights about human well-beingnand its determinants. We argue that future research on happiness in economics has a lot ofnpotential, but that it needs to be guided more by theory. We propose two ways to test theories ofnhappiness, and…

The basic idea behind this paper is that voters have to be able to distinguish the positions of the parties. Following Weber's Law this depends on the relative distance with respect to their own optimal position. Using such a measure a model of voter participation is developed which allows for abstention because of indifference as well as alienation. Two variants of this model…

The linkage between the interrelationships of a firm's lines of business and corporate financial performance has been the subject of extensive research in the strategy field. Yet very little research has examined this key relationship within firms operating in Continental Europe. This study investigates firm relatedness and its further relationship to accounting and market-based…

"Recent studies found evidence for nominal wage rigidity during periods of relatively high nominal GDP growth. It has been argued, however, that in an environment with low nominal GDP growth, when nominal wage cuts become customary, workers’ cuts would erode and, hence, firms would no longer hesitate to reduce nominal pay. If this argument is valid nominal wage rigidity…