infonet-economy

L'auteur examine les modifications des règlements de prévoyance avant le versement de prestations. Le changement de rentes courantes n'est juridiquement pas justifiable - l'argument de l'augmentation de l'espérance de vie est matériellement faux.
Les rapports de prévoyance sont des relations contractuelles. Pour déployer des effets, l'abaissement...

Under certain conditions the optimal insurance policy will offer full coverage above a deductible, as Arrow and others have shown long time ago. Interestingly, the same design of insurance policies applies in case of a single loss and ex-ante moral hazard. However, many insurance policies provide coverage against a variety of losses and the possibilities for the insured to affect the...

The basic idea behind this paper is that voters have to be able to distinguish the positions of the parties. Following Weber's Law this depends on the relative distance with respect to their own optimal position. Using such a measure a model of voter participation is developed which allows for abstention because of indifference as well as alienation. Two variants of this model...

This paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting, where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution. A key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends positively on current redistribution, since this affects both private investments and the future distribution of voters. The model...

We present an economic experiment on network formation, in which subjects can decide to form links to one another. Direct links are costly but being connected is valuable. The game-theoretic basis for our experiment is the model of Bala and Goyal (2000). They distinguish between two scenarios regarding the flow of benefits through a network, the so-called 1-way and 2-way flow model....

Does individual well-being depend on the absolute level of income and consumption or is it relative to one's aspirations? In a direct empirical test, it is found that higher income aspirations reduce people's utility, ceteris paribus. Individual data on reported satisfaction with life are used as a proxy measure for utility, and income evaluation measures are applied as...

From the mid-1990s citizens in Belgium, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and Switzerland have a guaranteed periodic choice among risk-bearing sickness funds, who are responsible for purchasing their care or providing them with medical care. The rationale of this arrangement is to stimulate the sickness funds to improve efficiency in health care production and to respond to consumers...

This paper develops a two-sector general-equilibrium model in which firms in the primary economy have to create workplaces prior to production and product market competition. For this, we introduce the endogenous sunk-cost approach with two-stage decisions of firms from IO in the macro labor literature. By hypothesizing that technological change has lowered marginal costs but has...

We present a new approach to endogenizing technological spillovers. Firms choose levels of a cost-reducing innovation from a continuum before they engage in competition for each other's R&D-employees. Successful bids for the competitor's employee then result in higher levels of cost reduction. Finally, firms enter product market competition. We apply the approach to the...