infonet-economy

Many governments subsidize regional rail service as an alternative to road traffic. This paper assesses whether increases in service frequency reduce road traffic externalities. We exploit differences in service frequency growth by procurement mode following a railway reform in Germany to address endogeneity of service growth. Increases in service frequency reduce the number of...

Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largely disregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates whether a specific, yet important, award in economics, the John Bates Clark Medal, raises recipients’ subsequent research activity and status compared to a synthetic control group of nonrecipient scholars with similar previous research performance. We...

A number of OECD countries aim to encourage work integration of disabled persons using quota policies. For instance, Austrian firms must provide at least one job to a disabled worker per 25 nondisabled workers and are subject to a tax if they do not. This “threshold design” provides causal estimates of the noncompliance tax on disabled employment if firms do not manipulate...

This paper investigates empirically how similarity of demand structures - approximated by similarity of income distributions - affects trade patterns along both the extensive and intensive margin. The idea that similarity of demand structures intensifies trade goes back to the well-known Linder hypothesis. Based on a sample of 102 countries, I find that bilateral trade volumes are...

Rewards in real life are rarely received without incurring costs and successful reward harvesting often involves weighing and minimizing different types of costs. In the natural environment, such costs often include the physical effort required to obtain rewards and potential risks attached to them. Costs may also include potential risks. In this study, we applied fMRI to explore the...

Value-based decisions optimize the relation of costs and benefits. Costs and benefits confer not only value but also salience, which may influence decision making through attentional mechanisms. However, the computational and neurobiological role of salience in value-based decisions remains elusive. Here we develop and contrast two formal concepts of salience for value-based choices...

This article addresses the democratic deficit that emerges when private corporations engage in public policy, either by providing citizenship rights and global public goods (corporate citizenship) or by influencing the political
system and lobbying for their economic interests (strategic corporate political activities). This democratic deficit is significant, especially when...

A new model class for univariate asset returns is proposed which involves the use of mixtures of stable Paretian distributions, and readily lends itself to use in a multivariate context for portfolio selection. The model nests numerous ones currently in use, and is shown to outperform all its special cases. In particular, an extensive out-of-sample risk forecasting exercise for seven...