infonet-economy

Policy makers have an increasing interest in designing appropriate public R&D policy programs to stimulate national innovativeness and competitiveness. First, this study investigates the effects of public R&D subsidies on firms’ R&D investments accounting for the collaboration pattern of the subsidized firms. Second, this representative analysis further puts light on the...

Effective policies combating global warming and incentivising reduction of greenhouse gases face fundamental collective action problems. States defending short term interests avoid international commitments and seek to benefit from measures combating global warming taken elsewhere. The paper explores the potential of Common Concern as an emerging principle of international law, in...

Fehler in Spitälern können dramatische Folgen haben. Deshalb werden heute zunehmend Meldesysteme eingeführt, wo Spital­angehörige vertraulich oder anonym kritische ­Vorkommnisse berichten können. Solche «Critical Incident Reporting Systems» (CIRS) sollen die Chance eröffnen, aus Fehlern zu lernen. Tun sie das?

In historical accounts of the world economic crisis of the 1930s, Switzerland is known for its staunch defense of the gold standard and the rise of corporatist policies. Yet, so far, the literature has not discussed the implications of these two features. This paper tries to show how the combination of hard-currency policy and nominal rigidities introduced by corporatist policies...

We model capital flows among Chinese provinces using a theory-based variance decomposition that allows us to gauge the importance of various channels of external adjustments at the regional level: variation in intertemporal prices - domestic and international interest rates and the real exchange rate - and intertemporal variation in quantities (cash flows of output, investment and...

Social capital is often associated with desirable political and economic outcomes. This paper connects a growing literature on the "dark side" of social capital with institutional change. We examine the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany. Using new data on Nazi Party entry in a cross-section of cities, we show that dense networks of civic associations such as bowling...

Poverty is often characterized not only by low and unstable income, but also by heavy debt burdens. We find that reducing barriers to saving through access to free savings accounts decreases participants' short-term debt by about 20%. In addition, participants who experience an economic shock have less need to reduce consumption, and subjective well-being improves significantly...

China wird sich nicht von der EU abwenden, nur weil es einen Gasdeal mit Russland schließt. Das sagt der italienische Ökonom und Chinakenner Fabrizio Zilibotti. Interview: Axel Hansen

Existing evidence shows that decision-makers’ social ties to internal co-workers can lead to reduced firm performance. In this paper, we show that decision-makers’ social ties to external transaction partners can also hurt firm performance. Specifically, we use 34 years of data from the National Basketball Association and study the relationship between a team's winning...