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Social spending and household welfare: evidence from Azerbaijan

We measure the response of household consumption of different income groups to social spending during the 2002-2012 period using the aggregated Household Budget Survey Data. We find that households respond more strongly to changes in pensions than to changes in allowances and in-kind transfers. The very weak response of households to changes in allowances and in-kind transfers, both...

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/ 01/04/2014

Merger control procedures and institutions: a comparison of the EU and US practice

The objective of this paper is to discuss and compare the role that different constituencies play in US and EU procedures for merger control. We describe the main constituencies (both internal and external) involved in merger control in both jurisdictions and discuss how a typical merger case would be handled under these procedures. At each stage, we consider how the procedure...

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/ 01/04/2014

Fatal attraction: ventral striatum predicts costly choice errors in humans

Animals approach rewards and cues associated with reward, even when this behavior is irrelevant or detrimental to the attainment of these rewards. Motivated by these findings we study the biology of financially-costly approach behavior in humans. Our subjects passively learned to predict the occurrence of erotic rewards. We show that neuronal responses in ventral striatum during this...

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English / 01/04/2014

A dynamic hurdle model for zero-inflated count data: with an application to health care utilization

Excess zeros are encountered in many empirical count data applications. We provide a new explanation of extra zeros, related to the underlying stochastic process that generates events. The process has two rates, a lower rate until the first event, and a higher one thereafter. We derive the corresponding distribution of the number of events during a fixed period and extend it to...

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English / 01/04/2014

Targeted vs. collective information sharing in networks

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google+. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing. Agents value being connected to other agents and sharing and receiving information. We...

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English / 01/04/2014

In search of economic reality under the veil of financial markets

This paper presents a general equilibrium model with technological uncertainty, financial markets and imperfect information. The future consists of uncertain environments that are more or less clearly distinguishable (measurable). This limits the possibilities of specialization and diversification. Households have no direct information about the productivity of risky technologies....

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English / 01/04/2014

Protestantism and education: Reading the Bible and other skills.

During industrialization, Protestants were more literate than Catholics. This paper investigates whether this fact may be led back to the intrinsic motivation of Protestants to read the bible and to what extent other education motives might have been involved as well. We employ a historical data set from Switzerland which allows us to differentiate between different cognitive skills...

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English / 01/04/2014

Fear, folly, and financial crises: some policy lessons from history

Since the world financial crisis of 2007 / 2008, it has become clear that financial crises and the major economic downturns they cause happen neither just in distant countries nor in the distant past. They are part of the economic realities of developed countries in the present. In the second Public Paper, the author presents the latest academic insights into the history of financial...

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English / 01/04/2014

How do exporters adjust to exchange-rate fluctuations?: new evidence from the East African community

We use a large sample of export transactions from customs files across six developing countries and several years to explore the extent of pricing to market and volume responses to exchange-rate variations in the East African Community (EAC), a customs union, and a control group of exporters from developing countries outside the region. We find that, relative to the control group,...

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/ 27/03/2014

The (lack of) impact of impact: why impact evaluations seldom lead to evidence-based policymaking

A recurring puzzle to many academics and some policymakers is why impact evaluations, which have become something of a cottage industry in the development field, have so little impact on actual policymaking. In this paper, I study the impact of impact evaluations. I show, in a simple Bayesian framework embedded within a standard contest success function-based model of competition...

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English / 19/03/2014

Social comparison and effort provision: evidence from a field experiment

Social comparison processes have potentially far reaching consequences for many economic domains. We conducted a randomized field experiment to examine how social comparison affects workers’ effort provision if their own wage or the wage of a co‐worker is cut. Workers were assigned to groups of two, performed identical individual tasks, and received the same performanceindependent...

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English / 17/03/2014

R&D networks: theory, empirics and policy implications

We study a structural model of R&D alliance networks in which firms jointly form R&D collaborations to lower their production costs while competing on the product market. We derive the Nash equilibrium of this game, provide a welfare analysis and determine the optimal R&D subsidy program that maximizes total welfare. We also identify the key firms, i.e. the firms whose...

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English / 01/03/2014

Mixed equilibria in Tullock contests

Any symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium in a Tullock contest with intermediate values of the decisiveness parameter ("2 < R < ∞") has countably infinitely many mass points. All probability weight is concentrated on those mass points, which have the zero bid as their sole point of accumulation. With contestants randomizing over a non-convex set, there is a cost of...

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English / 01/03/2014

God does not play dice, but people should: random selection in politics, science and society

This paper discusses and proposes random selection as a component in decision-making in society. Random procedures have played a significant role in history, especially in classical Greece and the medieval city-states of Italy. We examine the important positive features of decisions by random Mechanisms. Random processes allow representativeness with respect to individuals and groups...

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English / 01/03/2014

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