infonet-economy

"This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences fornpublic goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-beingndata are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengthsnof this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues arenaddressed. Moreover, it is applied to…

Recent advances in the econometric modelling of count data have often been based on the generalized method of moments (GMM). However, the two-step GMM procedure may perform poorly in small samples, and several empirical likelihood-based estimators have been suggested alternatively. In this paper I discuss empirical likelihood (EL) estimation for count data models with endogenous…

This paper tests the effect of a matching mechanism on donations in a controlled fieldnexperiment. We match the donations of students at the University of Zurich who, each semester, have to decide whether they wish to contribute to two Social Funds. Our results support thenhypothesis that a matching mechanism increases contributions to a public good. However, the effect depends on…

This paper tests the effect of a matching mechanism on donations in a controlled fieldnexperiment. We match the donations of students at the University of Zurich who, each semester,nhave to decide whether they wish to contribute to two Social Funds. Our results support thenhypothesis that a matching mechanism increases contributions to a public good. However, theneffect depends on…

We provide a framework for analyzing bilateral mergers when there is two-sided asymmetric information about firms’ types. We show that there is always a "no-merger" equilibrium where firms do not consent to a merger, irrespective of their type. There may also be a "cut-off" equilibrium if the expected merger returns satisfy a suitable single crossing condition,…

This is a very colorful paper that makes for interesting reading. The author shows that the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) increasingly does not decide about market access to drugs only, but influences the innovation process as a whole. And although "information" does not appear in the title of the paper, the distribution of knowledge as affected by the FDA plays…

The observation that average health care expenditure rises with age generally leads experts and laymen alike to conclude that population ageing is the main driver of health care costs. In recently published studies we challenged this view (Zweifel et al., 1999; Felder et al., 2000). Analysing health care expenditure of deceased persons, we showed that age is insignificant if…

We analyze a macroeconomic model of monopolistic competition in which consumers earn unequal incomes. When preferences are nonhomothetic, the distribution of income affects equilibrium markups and equilibrium product diversity.

In dynamic wage bargaining models it is usually assumed that individual unemployment benefits are a fraction of the average wage level. In most countries, however, unemployment benefits are instead tied to the previous level of individually earned wages. We show how the analysis has to be modified if this fact is taken into account and compare our findings for the wage-setting curve…