infonet-economy

We experimentally study optional costly communication in Stag-Hunt games. Prior research demonstrates that efficient coordination is difficult without a communication option but obtains regularly with mandatory costless pre-play messages. We find that even small communication costs dramatically reduce message use when communication is optional, but efficient coordination can occur...

This study estimates the earning losses of workers experiencing an involuntary job separation. We employ, for the first time in the earning losses literature, a Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator with fixed effects that has several advantages with respect to conventional fixed effects models. The Poisson estimator allows considering the full set of involuntary separations,...

Many real-world networks have a nested structure. Examples range from biological ecosystems (e.g. mutualistic networks), industry systems (e.g. New York garment industry) to inter-bank networks (e.g. Fedwire bank network). A nested network has a graph topology such that a vertex’s neighborhood contains the neighborhood of vertices of lower degree. Thus, the adjacency matrix is...

Starting from the stylized fact that the Swiss franc is a safe haven currency, this paper focuses on the determinants of the Swiss franc during the lower bound regime from September 2011 to January 2015. We describe the Swiss franc as a function of global market risk fundamentals and find that the macroeconomic model outlined by Krugman (1991) describes the EUR/CHF exchange rate well...

From 2004 to 2012, the German social health insurance levied a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. We develop a new model for estimating the effect of such a co-payment on the individual number of visits per quarter. The model combines a one-time increase in the otherwise constant hazard rate determining the timing of doctor visits with a difference-in-...

Excess zeros are encountered in many empirical count data applications. We provide a new explanation of extra zeros, related to the underlying stochastic process that generates events. The process has two rates, a lower rate until the first event, and a higher one thereafter. We derive the corresponding distribution of the number of events during a fixed period and extend it to...

Higher levels of self-control in decision making have been linked to better psychosocial and physical health. A similar link to health outcomes has been reported for heart rate variability (HRV), a marker of physiological flexibility. Here, we sought to link these two, largely separate, research domains by testing the hypothesis that greater HRV would be associated with better...

Correlative evidence suggests that testosterone promotes dominance and aggression. However, causal evidence is scarce and offers mixed results. To investigate this relationship, we administered testosterone for 48h to 41 healthy young adult men in a within-subjects, double-blind placebo-controlled balanced crossover design. Subjects played the role of responders in an ultimatum game...