infonet-economy

We analyse interethnic cooperation in an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma when members of one group are unable to target punishment towards individual defectors from the other group. We first show that indiscriminate punishment may sustain cooperation in this setting. Our main result, however, is that the introduction of ingroup punishment in addition to outgroup punishment…

This paper employs recent data for Germany and a new outcome variable to assess the consequences of parental separation on the well-being of youths. In particular, it is considered how subjective well-being, elicited from an ordinal 11-point general life satisfaction question, differs between youths living in intact and non-intact families, holding many other potential determinants…

A joint Wharton School–World Bank conference called attention to the high proportions of medical care spending paid out of pocket in most developing countries. One of the reasons for this, attendees said, is the problem in such economies of generating high tax revenues in a nondistortive way. Since people are paying out of pocket, they should be able to afford some private insurance…

Elicitation methods in decision-making under risk allow us to infer the utilities of outcomes as well as the probability weights from the observed preferences of an individual. An optimally efficient elicitation method is proposed, which takes the inevitable distortion of preferences by random errors into account and minimizes the effect of such errors on the inferred utility and…

This paper analyzes the causal relationships between marriage and subjective well-being in a longitudinal data set spanning 17 years. We find evidence that happier 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,…

Economists often claim that their discipline has a great influence on the economy. An analysis of the existing literature reveals, however, that little convincing empirical evidence exists. The two approaches used are subject to major shortcomings. The "Economics Production Function" relating the input of economic ideas to economic outcomes, is faced with major estimation…

We provide a brief account of the ongoing debate on the relationship between international capital flows and economic growth. In particular, we argue that the current debate may be enriched by looking more closely at the relationship between these key variables and educational choice and public education policy.

Awards in the form of orders, medals, decorations, prizes, and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, and not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, this kind of nonmaterial extrinsic incentive has been given little attention in the social sciences, including psychology. The demand for awards relies on an individual's desire for…

In this article, we describe the various sorts of American Parisian options and propose valuation formulae. Although there is no closed-form valuation for these products in the non-perpetual case, we have been able to reformulate their price as a function of the exercise frontier. In the perpetual case, closed-form solutions or approximations are obtained by relying on excursion…