infonet-economy

In a pioneering approach towards the explanation of the phenomenon of “yes man” behavior in organizations, Prendergast [American Economic Review 83 (1993) 757–770] argued that incentive contracts in employment relationships generally make a worker distort his privately acquired information. This would imply that there is a trade-off between inducing a worker to exert costly effort...

This paper analyses the use of transfer pricing as a strategic device in divisionalized firms facing duopolistic price competition. When transfer prices are observable, both firms’ headquarters will charge a transfer price above the marginal cost of the intermediate product to induce their marketing managers to behave as softer competitors in the final product market. When transfer...

This paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on inequality and growth. After discussing historical and more recent distributional trends as well as empirical evidence on the relationship between inequality and growth, I focus on recent explanations of the inequality-growth puzzle. I consider both the impact of the functional and the personal distribution on long-run...

The valuation of Flexible Manufacturing Systems is one of the most frequently undertaken productivity improvement activities. In practice, the introduction of an FMS into industry must be done on the basis of cost justification. Recently developed techniques for the evaluation of the value of flexibility typically include the computation of stochastic dynamic programs. However, the...

Das Ziel dieser mikroökonometrischen Studie ist eine Abschätzung der Wirkungen der ar-beitsmarktlichen Massnahmen der Schweiz (AMM) auf die individuellen Erwerbswahrscheinlichkeiten potentieller Teilnehmer auf Basis administrativer Daten der Arbeitslosenversicherung und der Rentenversicherung. Es wird ein sehr grosser Teil der AMM gesamthaft unter Berücksichtigung ihrer heterogenen...

Income distribution embeds a large field of research subjects in economics. It is important to study how incomes are distributed among the members of a population in order for example to determine tax policies for redistribution to decrease inequality, or to implement social policies to reduce poverty. The available data come mostly from surveys (and not censuses as it is often...

With income distributions it is common to encounter the problem of missing data. When a parametric model is fitted to the data, the problem can be overcome by specifying the marginal distribution of the observed data. With classical methods of estimation such as the maximum likelihood (ML) an estimator of the parameters can be obtained in a straightforward manner. Unfortunately, it...

This paper provides a set of stochastic multistage programs where the evolvement of uncertain factors is given by stochastic processes. We treat a practical problem statement within the field of managing fixed-income securities. Detailed information on the used parameter values in various interest rate models is given. Barycentric approximation is applied to obtain computational...