infonet-economy

We study the monotonicity of sender’s equilibrium strategy with respect to her type in signalling games. We use counterexamples to show that when the sender’s payoff is non-separable, the Spence-Mirrlees condition cannot rule out equilibria in which the sender uses non-monotone strategies. These equilibria can survive standard refinements as incentives are strict and the sender plays...

We present the results of an empirical study, in which we analyze the ability of the Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) operator to model actual preferences in a multi-attribute ranking task. We compare the OWA to a competing model (Simple Additive Weighting SAW), and we also study whether its characteristic feature, the ability to represent different attitudes toward compensation among...

Institutions are an important means for fostering prosocial behaviors, but in many contexts their scope is limited and they govern only a subset of all socially desirable acts. We study experimentally how the presence and nature of an institution that enforces prosocial behavior in one domain affects behavior in a similar but unregulated domain. Groups play two identical public good...

We provide novel evidence on the role of income taxes for housing rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive micro-level data, we estimate the responsiveness of households to tax differentials across municipal boundaries. Correcting for unobservable location characteristics and isolating the residential sorting component, we identify an income tax elasticity of rents of...

We assess the quantitative implications of the re-use of collateral on financial market leverage, volatility, and welfare within an infinite-horizon asset-pricing model with heterogeneous agents. In our model, the ability of agents to re-use frees up collateral that can be used to back more transactions. Re-use thus contributes to the build-up of leverage and significantly increases...

How established is the horizontal permeability between modes of vocational education and training (VET) in Switzerland? Formally encouraged by the Swiss law on VET, horizontal permeability refers to transitions across VET modes, i.e. between dual and school-based VET. This paper first discusses why horizontal permeability is indeed relevant and then empirically examines the...