infonet-economy

Discrete-choice experiments, while becoming increasingly popular, have rarely been tested for validity and reliability. This contribution purports to provide some evidence of a rather unique type. Two surveys designed to measure willingness-to-accept (WTA) for reform op-tions in Swiss health care and health insurance are used to provide independent information with regard to two...

Le mouvement dit du New Public Management, venu tout droit des pays anglo-saxons, a introduit l’idée de gérer les services publics comme des entreprises, et donc d’utiliser des indicateurs de production comme outils de mesure de la performance. Le monde de la recherche n’échappe pas à ce traitement et doit rendre des comptes. L’article ne porte pas tant sur la question de fond de la...

Conventional fMRI analyses assess the summary of temporal information in terms of the coefficients of temporal basis functions. Based on established finite impulse response (FIR) analysis methodology we show how spatiotemporal statistical parametric maps may be concatenated to form Brain Activation Movies (BAMs), dynamic activation maps representing the temporal evolution of brain...

Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to financial markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in which small firms account for a large share of output. In addition, better access...

This paper examines the role of religious denomination for human capital formation. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82nand 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of conscripts (1875-1903), andnresults from political referenda to capture conservative or...

This paper establishes a surprising and robust empirical similarity between short-run heterogeneous consumption and long-term consumption growth risk models. The models not only deliver a similar fit on a given set of portfolios, their actual pricing errors are also highly correlated. In addition, we find that consumption dispersion is a robust predictor of the transitory component...

This study compares the performance of Prospect Theory versus Stochastic Expected Utility Theory at fitting data on decision making under risk. Both theories incorporate well-known deviations from Expected Utility Maximization such as the Allais paradox or the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes. Stochastic Expected Utility Theory parsimoniously extends the standard microeconomic...

The use of microworlds (MWs), or complex dynamic systems, in educational testing and personnel selection is hampered by systematic measurement errors because these new and innovative item formats are not adequately controlled for their difficulty. This empirical study introduces a way to operationalize an MW's difficulty and demonstrates the strong effects of variations in it. A...