infonet-economy

Modern bioenergy is seen as a promising option to curb greenhouse gas emissions. There is, however, a potential competition for land and water between bioenergy and food crops. Another question is whether biomass for energy use can be produced in a sustainable manner given the current conventional agricultural production practices. Other than the land and water competition, this...

We examine equilibria in competitive insurance markets with adverse selection when wealth differences arise endogenously from unobservable savings or labor supply decisions. The endogeneity of wealth implies that high risk individuals may ceteris paribus exhibit the lower marginal willingness to pay for insurance than low risks, a phenomenon that we refer to as irregular-crossing...

Using a two-sector endogenous growth model, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate cycles in output, consumption, investment and hours. To contextualize our findings, we also assess whether the human capital model or the standard real business cycle (RBC) model better explains the observed...

This paper argues that the “Economics of Crime” concentrates too much on punishment as a policy to fight crime, which is unwise for several reasons. There are important instances in which punishment simply cannot reduce crime. Several feasible alternatives to punishment exist, such as offering positive incentives or handing out awards for law abiding behavior. These alternative...

This paper reports an experiment examining the effect of social norms on pro-social behavior. We test two predictions derived from work in psychology regarding the influence of norms. The first is a “focusing” influence, whereby norms only impact behavior when an individual’s attention is drawn to them; and the second is an “informational” influence, whereby a norm exerts a stronger...

A simple consumption-based two-period model is used to study the (theoretical) effects of disagreement on asset prices. Analytical and numerical results show that individual uncertainty has a much larger effect on risk premia than disagreement if (i) the risk aversion is reasonably high and (ii) individual uncertainty is not much smaller than disagreement. Evidence from survey data...

Within the discussion of voluntary proactive approaches to environmental protection, former microeconometric studies analyze the causal effect of the adoption of environmental management systems (EMS) on technological environmental innovations and find some positive impacts. Based on empirical studies which consider the effect of general innovativeness on the adoption of voluntary...

Kleine Unternehmen (KU) sind einem zunehmenden Preiskampf ausgesetzt. Transparenz, Globalisierung und Internet sensibilisieren Kunden hinsichtlich der Preise und erhöhen deren Marktmacht. In diesem Wettbewerb gilt es aber für
Unternehmerinnen und Unternehmer eine Strategie zu definieren, die über die Festsetzung eines Frankenbetrags für Produkte und Dienstleistungen hinausgeht...

Les petites entreprises sont exposées à une guerre des prix de plus en plus intense. La transparence, la mondialisation et Internet sensibilisent les clients à la question des prix, ce qui augmente leur pouvoir sur le marché. Face à cette concurrence croissante, les entrepreneurs doivent définir une stratégie qui ne se limite pas à la fixation d'un prix pour un produit ou un...