Publications des institutions partenaires
Limited rationality and strategic interaction: the impact of the strategic environment on nominal inertia
Much evidence suggests that people are heterogeneous with regard to their abilities to make rational, forward-looking decisions. This raises the question as to when the rational types are decisive for aggregate outcomes and when the boundedly rational types shape aggregate results. We examine this question in the context of a long-standing and important economic problem: the...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
On the feasibility of insurers' investment policies
This article calls attention to a difficulty with insurers' investment policies that seems to have been overlooked so far. There is the distinct possibility that insurers cannot satisfy the demands of different stakeholders in terms of expected returns and volatility. While using the capital asset pricing model as the benchmark, this article distinguishes two groups of...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Validity and Reliability of Willingness-to-Pay Estimates: Evidence from Two Overlapping Discrete-Choice Experiments
Discrete-choice experiments, while becoming increasingly popular, have rarely been tested for validity and reliability. This contribution purports to provide some evidence of a rather unique type. Two surveys designed to measure willingness-to-accept (WTA) for reform op-tions in Swiss health care and health insurance are used to provide independent information with regard to two...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Freiwilligenarbeit in der Firma: ein monetärer und menschlicher Gewinn
Dienst nach Vorschrift ist auf dem Vormarsch. Möchten Firmen von den Mitarbeitern mehr freiwilliges Engagement, müssen sie ihnen mehr Wertschätzung und Mitbestimmung geben.
Institution partenaire
Deutsch / 01/03/2008
Paleopathologies of the vertebral column in medieval skeletons
Paleopathological data provide valuable information about health, longevity and mortality in earlier human populations. We investigated the incidence of spinal pathologies on 54 individuals (1045 vertebrae and 18 sacral bones) that belong to a medieval skeletal series discovered in the Dalheim monastery (Northwest Germany) and compared them with contemporary and recent populations....
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Time-resolved analysis of fMRI signal changes using Brain Activation Movies
Conventional fMRI analyses assess the summary of temporal information in terms of the coefficients of temporal basis functions. Based on established finite impulse response (FIR) analysis methodology we show how spatiotemporal statistical parametric maps may be concatenated to form Brain Activation Movies (BAMs), dynamic activation maps representing the temporal evolution of brain...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Consumption Risk Sharing over the Business cycle: the role of Small Firms' Access to Credit Markets
Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to financial markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in which small firms account for a large share of output. In addition, better access...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Openness, Government Size and the Terms of Trade
This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size ofngovernments, both theoretically and empirically. We argue that openness can increase the size of governments through two channels: (1) a terms of trade externality, whereby trade lowers the domestic cost of taxation, and (2) the demand for insurance, whereby trade raises risk and public transfers. We...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Qualifying Religion: The Role of Plural Identities for Educational Production
This paper examines the role of religious denomination for human capital formation. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82nand 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of conscripts (1875-1903), andnresults from political referenda to capture conservative or...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Ensuring Financial Stability: Financial Structure and the Impact of Monetary Policy on Asset Prices
This paper studies the responses of residential property and equity prices,ninflation and economic activity to monetary policy shocks in 17 countries, using data spanning 1986-2006. We estimate VARs for individual economies and panel VARs in which we distinguish between groups of countries on the basis of the characteristics of their financial systems. The results suggest that using...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Heterogeneous Expectations, International Consumption Correlations, and Common Risk Factors in World Stock Markets
This paper establishes a surprising and robust empirical similarity between short-run heterogeneous consumption and long-term consumption growth risk models. The models not only deliver a similar fit on a given set of portfolios, their actual pricing errors are also highly correlated. In addition, we find that consumption dispersion is a robust predictor of the transitory component...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
The effect of trade openness on optimal government size under endogenous firm entry
This paper analyzes the effect of trade liberalization on government spending in a general equilibrium model with a continuum of industries supplying tradable and nontradable goods under monopolistic competition. Trade liberalization is modeled as the opening up of product markets between two countries, which may differ in total factor productivity, factor endowment and fix cost...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Stochastic Expected Utility and Prospect Theory in a Horse Race: A Finite Mixture Approach
This study compares the performance of Prospect Theory versus Stochastic Expected Utility Theory at fitting data on decision making under risk. Both theories incorporate well-known deviations from Expected Utility Maximization such as the Allais paradox or the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes. Stochastic Expected Utility Theory parsimoniously extends the standard microeconomic...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2008
Public Employment Services and Employers - How Important are Networks with Firms?
This paper examines whether contacts between caseworkers in public employment offices and employers impact on the reemployment chances of the unemployed they counsel. This analysis is made possible through a large administrative dataset on unemployed combined
with an extensive survey of caseworkers' characteristics and their strategies. This data was created for evaluating...
Institution partenaire
English / 26/02/2008
Zu fairen Konditionen lancierte Pflichtwandelanleihe der UBS
Institution partenaire
Deutsch / 21/02/2008
Simulation-Based Pricing of Convertible Bonds
We propose and empirically study a pricing model for convertible bonds based on Monte Carlo simulation. The method uses parametric representations of the early exercise decisions and consists of two stages. Pricing convertible bonds with the proposed Monte Carlo approach allows us to better capture both the dynamics of the underlying state variables and the rich set of real-world...
Institution partenaire
English / 12/02/2008
Liquidité des marchés financiers et prêteur en dernier ressort
À l’été 2007, les problèmes liés à la dette subprime aux États-Unis ont entraîné des perturbations sur de nombreux segments du système financier, en particulier sur les marchés monétaires interbancaires, obligeant les banques centrales américaine et européenne à intervenir à maintes reprises afin de rétablir un bon fonctionnement. Cet article examine les circonstances dans lesquelles...
Institution partenaire
Français / 01/02/2008
A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for multiple imputation in large surveys
Important empirical information on household behavior and household finances, used heavily by researchers, central banks, and for policy consulting, is obtained from surveys. However, various interdependent factors that can only be controlled to a limited extent lead to unit and item nonresponse, and missing data on certain items is a frequent source of difficulties in statistical...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/02/2008
Rationality on the Rise: Why Relative Risk Aversion Increases with Stake Size
How does risk tolerance vary with stake size? This important question cannot be adequately answered if framing effects, nonlinear probability weighting, and heterogeneity of preference types are neglected. We show that, contrary to gains, no coherent change in relative risk aversion is observed for losses. The increase in relative risk aversion over gains cannot be captured by the...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/02/2008
Providing Public Goods in the Absence of Strong Institutions
This paper proposes a simple two-stage mechanism to establishnpositive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions tonprovide the public good and to sanction free-riders. In this mechanism players commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution stage.nIf there is universal commitment, deposits are immediately refunded whenever...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/02/2008
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