infonet-economy

Numerous survey studies report that human resource managers curb wage inequality with the intent to avoid detrimental effects on workers’ morale. However, there exists little controlled empirical evidence demonstrating that horizontal social comparisons and wage inequality have adverse effects on worker behavior. In this paper, we present data from a laboratory experiment that...

This paper adapts the modern workhorse model of quantitative trade theory (Eaton and Kortum, 2002) as a measurement tool to quantify the magnitudes of Switzerland’s gains from trade. I find that the importance of single trading partners for Switzerland’s welfare is surprisingly small. The reason are reallocation effects - if trade between Switzerland and some partner country is...

The paper introduces a simple framework for analyzing the environmental effects of local transportation policies, and it reviews some evidence. In several cases, subsidies for local public transportation have led to substantial reductions in road transportation and have thereby reduced externalities. Some but not all estimates suggest positive overall welfare effects of such policies...

This paper uses a panel data set containing universities across eight European countries to model an output distance function and analyze the impact of three competitive funding types on the production frontier and the university effciency. We find little evidence for an effect of the budget share financed by tuition fees or private funds on the production frontier, but a...

In this paper, I examine ε-equilibria of stationary dynamic economies with heterogeneous agents and possibly incomplete financial markets. I give a simple example to show that even for arbitrarily small ε > 0, allocation and prices can be far away from exact equilibrium allocations and prices. That is, errors in market clearing or individuals' optimality conditions do not...

We study the optimal policies and mean-variance frontiers (MVF) of a multiperiod mean-variance optimization of assets and liabilities (AL). This makes the analysis more challenging than for a setting based on purely exogenous liabilities, in which the optimization is only performed on the assets while keeping liabilities fixed. We show that, under general conditions for the joint AL...

In this paper we identify conditions under which the introduction of a pay-as-you-go social security system is ex-ante Pareto-improving in a stochastic overlapping genera-
tions economy with capital accumulation and land. We argue that these conditions are consistent with realistic specifications of the parameters of the economy. In our model, financial markets are complete and...