infonet-economy

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line with their interests and values. Here, we use a two-stage field-survey experiment to...

Many studies on insider trading are based on data of the U.S. market and conclude that insiders can earn abnormal profits. This paper examines for the Swiss stock market whether insiders can earn abnormal profits and whether outsiders can make abnormal profits by mimicking the transactions of insiders. We find significant abnormal returns for insider trading, as well as some evidence...

The Sharpe ratio is adequate for evaluating investment funds when the returns of those funds are normally distributed and the investor intends to place all his risky assets into just one investment fund. Hedge fund returns differ significantly from a normal distribution. For this reason, other performance measures for hedge fund returns have been proposed in both the academic and...

http://www.manuel-ammann.com/pdf/PubsAmmann2007_SchweizerPersonalvorsorg...

Mandating universal service requires the public to decide what services people should have and what prices they should pay. Postal services have traditionally been financed by charging the senders only, while recent steps in the liberalization of the postal sector forced policymakers to find a broader financial basis for postal services. The existence of a receiver externality, the...

Quality of life factors continue to gain importance in residential location decisions as well as location decisions of firms. One such factor is an attractive local landscape. The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of the empirical literature on the role of landscape amenities in local economic change. Following common amenity definitions, we define landscape amenities as...

We examine optimal taxation and social insurance with adverse selection in competitive insurance markets. In a previous literature, it has been shown that, with perfect insurance markets, social insurance improves welfare since it is able to redistribute without creating distortions. This result has been taken as robust to the introduction of adverse selection as this would only...

In an evaluation of a job-training program, the influence of the program on the individual earnings capacity is important, because it reflects the program effect on human capital. Estimating these effects is complicated because earnings are observed for employed individuals only, and employment is itself an outcome of the program. Point identification of these effects can only be...

In Germany, the streaming of students into an academic or nonacademic track at age 10 can be revised at later stages of secondary education. To investigate the importance of such revisions, we use administrative data on the student population in the German state of Hessen to measure the persistence of school entry age's impact on choice of secondary school track. Based on...