infonet-economy

Industrial delicensing which began in 1985 in India marked a discrete break from a past of centrally planned industrial development. Similar liberalization episodes are taking place across the globe. We develop a simple Schumpeterian growth model to understand how firms respond to the entry threat imposed by liberalization. The model emphasises that firm responses, even within the...

Awards in the form of orders, medals, decorations and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies andnrepublics, private organizations, not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, economists have disregarded this kind of non-material extrinsic incentive.nThe demand for awards relies on an individual’s desire for distinction, and the supply ofnawards on the provision of incentives...

"We study the causal effects of changes in parental leave provisions on fertility and return-to-work behavior. We exploit a policy change that took place in 1990 in Austria which extended the maximum duration of parental leave from the child’s first to the child’s second birthday. As parental leave benefits can be automatically renewed when a new mother is still on leave from a...

Consider the problem of testing s hypotheses simultaneously. The usual approach tondealing with the multiplicity problem is to restrict attention to procedures that controlnthe probability of even one false rejection, the familiar familywise error rate (FWER). Innmany applications, particularly if s is large, one might be willing to tolerate more than onenfalse rejection if the...

Der Wettbewerb zwischen den sozialen Krankenversicherern wird immer mehr zum Kampf um günstige Risiken. Die erhoffte Dämpfung des Prämienanstiegs bleibt dagegen aus. Das ist eine direkte Folge der verfehlten Rahmenbedingungen, die das Kostensparen unrentabel, die volkswirtschaftlich unsinnige Risikoselektion dagegen rentabel machen. Es handelt sich dabei nicht um ein Marktversagen,...

This paper provides evidence on the relation between the intensity of product market competition and the probability of exit. We adopt a natural experiment approach towards analyzing the impact of a tightening of Swiss antitrust legislation on exit probabilities. Based on a sample of more than 68,000 firms from all major sectors of the Swiss economy, we find that the exit probability...

We consider an economy where a finite set of agents can trade on one of two asset markets. Due to endogenous participation the differ in the liquidity they provide. Traders have idiosyncratic preferencesnfor the markets, e.g. due to differential time preferences for maturity dates of futures contracts. For a broad range of parameters we find that nontrade, trade on both markets (...

This paper examines the determinants of mergers and bankruptcies, using firm level data from the Swiss Business Census and the Dun & Bradstreet exit database for Switzerland (1995-2000). Employing duration analysis, we find considerable differences in the determinants of mergers and bankruptcies, in particular with respect to firm size, location and the impact of macroeconomic...

Base-rate neglect is a robust experimental finding that individuals do not update their prior beliefs according to the Bayes' rule and, typically, underestimate their posterior probabilities. Another empirical finding is that individuals often do not acquire information even when there are no strategic considerations and the cost of new information is justifiableneconomically....