infonet-economy

Inspired by findings of low–dimensional nonlinearities and the Theorem of Takens (1983) forecasting models of financial time series are often built upon nonparametric, i.e. universal nonlinear, univariate relationships. Empirical investigations, however, are seriously contaminated by the problem of overfitting. Since statistical model selection theory in the nonlinear case is still...

"The most influential theory of corporate governance, principal agency theory, does not take intonconsideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the interests of top management and directors should be increasingly aligned to shareholder interests...

It is important for animals to estimate the value of rewards as accurately as possible. Because the number of potential reward values is very large, it is necessary that the brain's limited resources be allocated so as to discriminate better among more likely reward outcomes at the expense of less likely outcomes. We found that midbrain dopamine neurons rapidly adapted to the...

Typical of the AIDS epidemics is that governments in developing countries under-invest in drugs production because of the possible appearance of a curative vaccine. We design a financialntool allowing to hedge against this event. We show that the introduction of this asset increases social welfare, as well as the number of patients treated and the provision of public good.

"This paper aims to show that the market selection hypothesis in finance is not solely driven by the competitiveness of such markets, as was originally claimed by Alchian [1] and Friedman [4]. Within a standard intertemporal General Equilibrium framework, we allow for an agentnto have enough influence on financial markets to strategically affect prices of assets traded. We then...

Individuals make systematic mistakes in their decisions, because they mispredict utility from choice options. When deciding, extrinsic attributes of choice options are more salient than intrinsic attributes. Adaptation is neglected, recollection of feelings is distorted, decisions are rationalized and wrong intuitive theories of happiness are applied. People overestimate extrinsic...

During the 1990s, the social health insurance schemes of Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Israel were significantly reformed by the introduction of freedom of choice (open enrolment) of health insurer. This was introduced alongside a system of risk adjustment to compensate health insurers for enrolees with predictable high medical expenses. Despite the similarity in...

The idea to learn about international capital mobility from saving and investment data remains appealing. Our approach is based on VAR methods and overcomes some of the problems associated with saving–investment regressions when the data are non-stationary. We propose a new measure of long-run capital mobility that can be easily calculated as a by-product of the estimation procedure...