infonet-economy

In this paper, I analyze the determinants of college enrolment and the changes in these determinants over time. I propose a quantitative life-cycle model with college enrolment. Altruistic parents provide financial support to their children. Using counterfactual experiments, I find that 24 percent of all households are financially constrained in their college decision. Constraints…

Empirical evidence shows that workers care about the mission of their job in addition to their wage. This suggests that employers can use the job mission to incentivize and screen their workers. I study a model in which a principal selects an agent to develop a project and influences the agent's ex post level of effort not by outcome-contingent rewards, but by the choice of the…

This paper analyzes two-stage rank-order tournaments. A principal decides (i) how to spread prize money across the two periods, (ii) how to weigh performance in the two periods when awarding the second-period prize, and (iii) whether to reveal performance after the first period. The information revelation policy depends exclusively on properties of the effort cost function. The…

Successful policies for helping the unemployed need to confront the adverse effects of unemployment on feelings of life satisfaction.

Reducing tax evasion is a key priority for many governments, particularly in developing countries. A growing literature has argued that the ability to verify taxpayer self-reports against reports from third parties is critical for modern tax enforcement and the growth of state capacity. However, there may be limits to the effectiveness of third-party information if taxpayers can make…

What is the impact of after-school center-based care on the development of primary school-aged children? Answering this question is challenging due to non-random selection of children into after-school center-based care. We tackle this challenge using detailed data of the German Child Panel and employing a value-added method. While we do not find significant effects on average, our…

One of the most dramatic trends in banking since 2000 has been the secular movement away from core banking and interest generating activities towards enhanced reliance on non-interest-generating activities that focus largely on fees and trading profits. This has changed the banking model from traditional asset formation, such as deposit taking and lending, towards a model built on…

We examine the effect of the introduction of uniform water-charging for aquifer management and provide evidence using a survey-based choice experiment of agricultural water users in rural Tunisia. Theoretically, we show that the implementation of the proposed second-best regulation would result both in efficiency gains and in distributional effects in favour of small landholders.…

This paper examines with a case study of Beijing, China, the health benefits that could be reaped from urban air quality improvements. The study implements a household survey to collect information about the yearly medical expenditures and lost days of work, to estimates the total costs of illness (COI) borne by a typical individual due to airborne diseases. The results of this…