infonet-economy

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric method from the area of operations research that measures the relationship of produced outputs to assigned inputs and determines an efficiency score. This efficiency score can be interpreted as a performance measure in investment analysis. Recent literature contains intensive discussion of using DEA to measure the performance of...

Immer häufiger unterstützen Versicherungsgesellschaften auch präventive Projekte gegen Elementarschäden, weil mit einer Zunahme schlimmer Naturereignisse gerechnet wird. Die vorbeugende Schadenprävention wird bisher aber noch häufig zu wenig genutzt, insbesondere im deutschsprachigen Raum fristet sie ein Schattendasein. Schadenregulierer sehen sich häufig mit vermeidbaren...

Nordic historians have asserted for a long time that in the Nordic countries only few people, if any, perceived increased threats of war prior to the World War II outbreak. This would explain, and possibly excuse, why their governments did not mobilize their armies until it was too late. This paper questions this established notion by deriving new estimates of widely held war threat...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms provide their workers with skills that are sufficiently general to be potentially useful for competitors. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in industry-specific human capital, then make wage offers for each others’ trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product market competition....

Bereits vor einem Schadenereignis können Versicherungen eingreifen, um mögliche Auswirkungen zu minimieren. Der vorliegende Beitrag skizziert aktuelle Beispiele von Präventionsmassnahmen im Umfeld der Assekuranz, diskutiert die Funktion der Versicherung und zeigt auf, welche Optionen für Versicherer existieren, um sich in der Prävention zu positionieren.

In the literature on optimal indemnity schedules, indemnities are usually restricted to be non-negative. Keeler [1974] and Gollier [1987] show that this constraint might well bind: insured could get higher expected utility if insurance contracts would allow payments from the insured to the insurer at some losses. This paper extends Collier’s findings by allowing for negative...

We introduce non-homothetic preferences into an innovation-based growth model and study how income and wealth inequality affect economic growth. We identify a (positive) price effect -- where increasing inequality allows innovators to charge higher prices and (negative) market-size effects -- with higher inequality implying smaller markets for new goods and/or a slower transition of...

Labor market policy evaluation studies often rely on a merged database from different administrative entities, where part of the information might be archived with varying quality in different sources. Suppose that one observes inter alia a variable of dubious quality for the entire population and the same variable for a subgroup, say the treated, with good quality from an extra...

We analyse time-varying risk premia and the implications for portfolio choice. Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, we estimate a multivariate regime-switching model for the Carhart (1997) four factor model. We find two clearly separable Regimes with different mean returns, volatilities and correlations. In the High-Variance Regime, only value stocks deliver a good...