infonet-economy

Vergleicht man die Ausgestaltung der Zugangswege von Versicherern mit anderen Branchen, so lassen sich gravierende Unterschiede konstatieren: Tankstellen und Warenhäuser wandeln sich kontinuierlich und decken - neben der Kernleistung - eine Vielzahl zusätzlicher Bedürfnisse ab. Sportartikelhersteller wie Nike setzen mit Niketown genauso wie Apple mit seinen Genius Bars neue Massstäbe...

Early brain injury alters both structural and functional connectivity between the cerebral hemispheres. Despite increasing knowledge on the individual hemispheric contributions to recovery from such injury, we know very little about how their interactions affect this process. In the present study, we related interhemispheric structural and functional connectivity to receptive...

Against a backdrop of road accidents, pollution and congestion, many governments subsidise railways with the aim of reducing such externalities. But do improvements in public transport work? This column argues that recent empirical evidence confirms our expectations and, moreover, that public-transport improvements offer good value for money.

The WTO’s predicament is a puzzle. Compared to other international organisations it is a huge success, yet the WTO is widely regarded as suffering from a deep malaise. Exhibit A is the inability to conclude a round of multilateral trade negotiations. The last one came in 1994; the current talks (the Doha Round) are in their ninth year and far from done.1 Exhibit B is that most WTO...

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy – particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribution and where there is much concern about low social mobility. An anomaly in the spatial dimension of school funding policy in England allows us to examine the...

The motivation for this paper is to increase our understanding of the way in which inequality in educational outcomes and in the relation between measures of backgrounds is related to levels and dispersion of educational performance of young persons. The article thus sheds light on the international variation in the importance of socioeconomic status in affecting the quality of...

This paper analyzes the effect of injunctions on royalty negotiations for standard essential patents. We develop a model in which courts grant injunctions only when they have sufficient evidence that the prospective licensee is unwilling, in line with the way we understand Courts to operate in Europe. In such a framework the prospective licensee has a powerful strategic tool: the...

This paper develops a simple model with credit rationing and endogenous default risk in which the expectation of a bailout may lead to a financial sector which is too large with respect to the the social optimum. The paper concludes with a short discussion of how this model could be used as a building block for models aimed at endogenizing the probability of a bailout, and discussing...