infonet-economy

One important motive for deregulating social health insurance is to encourage product innovation. For the first time, the cost savings achieved by non-US managed care plans that are attributable to product innovation are estimated, using a novel approach. Panel data from a major Swiss health insurer permits to infer health status, which can be used to predict health care expenditure...

In the literature on optimal indemnity schedules, indemnities are usually restricted to be non-negative. Gollier (1987) shows that this constraint might well bind: insured could get higher expected utility if insurance contracts would allow payments from the insured to the insurer at some losses. However, due to the insurers’ cost function Gollier supposes, the optimal insurance...

Venture capitalists not only finance but also advise and thereby add value to young entrepreneurial firms. The prospects of venture capital backed firms thus depend on joint efforts of entrepreneurs and informed venture capitalists, and are subject to double moral hazard. For this reason, managerial support and the number of portfolio companies tend to be inefficiently low. This...

This paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation. Particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes, which is of high relevance in practice. For example, active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes, employment programmes and wage subsidies. Similarly, sickness...

"This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences fornpublic goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-beingndata are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengthsnof this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues arenaddressed. Moreover, it is applied to...

Recent advances in the econometric modelling of count data have often been based on the generalized method of moments (GMM). However, the two-step GMM procedure may perform poorly in small samples, and several empirical likelihood-based estimators have been suggested alternatively. In this paper I discuss empirical likelihood (EL) estimation for count data models with endogenous...

Unter dem Gesichtswinkel des Gleichstellungsgesetzes sind im überobligatorischen Bereich unterschiedliche Umwandlungssätze für Frau und Mann zwar zulässig. Erfolgt die Vorsorge aber zusammen mit einem Arbeitsverhältnis, wird dadurch der Anspruch der ArbeitnehmerIn auf gleiche Arbeitsbedingungen für gleiche Arbeit verletzt. Die von einem tieferen Umwandlungssatz betroffene...

In den meisten Vereinen wird alljährlich eine Hauptversammlung durchgeführt. Dabei gibt es sehr oft Diskussionen über die Durchführung von Abstimmungen und Wahlen. Dies ist auf die minimale gesetzliche Regelung und die teilweise schwer verständlichen Statutenbestimmungen zurückzuführen. Der nachfolgende Beitrag soll deshalb eine Hilfe bei derartigen Fragen sein. Die Aufbewahrung...

Volunteering constitutes one of the most important pro-social activities.nFollowing Adam Smith, helping others is the way to higher individual well-being. This viewncontrasts with the selfish utility maximizer who avoids costs from helping others. The twonrival views are studied empirically. We find robust evidence that volunteers are morensatisfied with their life than non-...