infonet-economy

We consider a repeated stochastic coordination game with imperfect public monitoring. In the game any pattern of coordinated play is a perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Moreover, standard equilibrium selection argumentsneither have no bite or they select an equilibrium that is not observed in actual plays of the game. We give experimental evidence for a unique equilibrium selection...

A well-known pitfall of Markowitz (1952) portfolio optimization is that the sample covariance matrix, which is a critical input, is very erroneous when there are many assets to choose from. Ifnunchecked, this phenomenon skews the optimizer towards extreme weights that tend to performnpoorly in the real world. One solution that has been proposed is to shrink the sample covariance...

Recent macroeconomic research discusses credit market imperfections as a key channel through which inequality retards growth. Limited borrowing prevents the less affluent individuals from investing the efficient amount, and the inefficiencies are considered to become stronger as inequality rises. This paper, though, argues that higher inequality may actually boost aggregate output...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g. pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the total of these rents: the difference in reported subjective well-being between bureaucrats and...

Can egalitarianism itself contribute to growth? This political scientist looks at the recent success of the Nordic states and answers “yes.” He also cites other characteristics that have made the Nordic economies work, not least their investment in education and policies to promote female employment.

Titre du projet: Mouvements de la société civile mondiale: Dynamique des campagnes internationales et de la mise en œuvre nationale

Dialogues on Migration Policy brings together leading American and European scholars of immigration politics to address migration policy. Editors Marco Giugni and Florence Passy's aim to present a number of informed "dialogues" addressing three main theoretical concerns in this field: the role of the national state in a globalizing world, the determinants of policy...

Latent variable models are used for analyzing multivariate data. Recently, generalized linear latent variable models for categorical, metric, and mixed-type responses estimated via maximum likelihood (ML) have been proposed. Model deviations, such as data contamination, are shown analytically, using the influence function and through a simulation study, to seriously affect ML...