infonet-economy

Does direct democracy tend to endanger or to protect minorities in multicultural countries? The response to this question has been controversial. Some scholars believe that direct democracy may result in “disregard of basic minority rights”; others think that it “serves to protect minorities”. This paper explores the experience of Switzerland, a longstanding multilingual democracy...

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws. Workers who compete with children in the labor market support a child labor ban, unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income. Fertility decisions lock agents into specific political preferences, and multiple steady states can arise. The introduction of child labor laws can be triggered...

In this note we show that no solution to coalition formation games can satisfy a set of axioms that we propose as reasonable. Our result points out that “solutions” to the coalition formation cannot be interpreted as predictions of what would be “resting points” for a game in the way stable coalition structures are usually interpreted.

Not available in German. Subsidised employment is an important tool of active labour market policies to improve the chances of the unemployed to find permanent employment. Using informative individual administrative data we investigate the effects of two different schemes of subsidised temporary employment implemented in Switzerland. One scheme operates as a non-profit employment...

We argue that the lack of large cross-cultural differences in many games with student subjects from developed countries may be due to the games studied. These games tap primarily basic psychological reactions, like fairness, and reciprocity. Once we look at norm-enforcement, in particular punishment, we find large differences even among culturally rather homogeneous student groups...

1. Ausgangssituation und Planungsvorgaben
2. Operationalisierung und Diskussion der Planungsvorgaben
3. Deckungsbeitragsrechnung und die Fiktion konstanter Stückdeckungsbeiträge
4. Ansatz der gemischt ganzzahligen Programmierung
5. Lösung mit dem Excel-Solver

Famous cultural monuments are often regarded as unique icons, making them an attractive target for terrorists. Despite huge military and police outlays, terrorist attacks on important monuments can hardly be avoided. We argue that an effective strategy for discouraging terrorist attacks on iconic monuments is for the government to show a firm commitment to swift reconstruction. Using...

Health insurance is potentially subject to risk selection, i.e. adverse selection on the part of consumers and cream skimming on the part of insurers. Adverse selection models predict that competitive health insurers can eschew high-risk individuals by o¤ering contracts with low deductibles or co-payment rates, while attracting low-risk individuals with higher copayments, resulting...

This paper examines the e®ects of introducing competition into monopolized network industries on prices and infrastructure quality. Analyzing a model with reduced-form demand, we ¯rst show that deregulating an integrated monopoly cannot simultaneously decrease the retail price and increase infrastructure quality. Second, we derive conditions under which reducing both retail price and...