infonet-economy

This article presents the cross-cultural validation of the Entitlement Attitudes Questionnaire, a tool designed to measure three facets of psychological entitlement: active, passive, and revenge entitlement. Active entitlement was defined as the tendency to protect individual rights based on self-worthiness. Passive entitlement was defined as the belief in obligations to and...

We assess the predictive and discriminant validity of the basic values in the refined Schwartz value theory by examining how value tradeoffs predict behavior in Italy, Poland, Russia, and the USA. One thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven respondents reported their values and rated their own and a partner’s behavior. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis supported the...

Markowitz (1952) portfolio selection requires an estimator of the covariance matrix of returns. To address this problem, we promote a nonlinear shrinkage estimator that is more flexible than previous linear shrinkage estimators and has just the right number of free parameters (i.e., the Goldilocks principle). This number is the same as the number of assets. Our nonlinear shrinkage...

From 2004 to 2012, the German social health insurance levied a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. We develop a new model for estimating the effect of such a co-payment on the individual number of visits per quarter. The model combines a one-time increase in the otherwise constant hazard rate determining the timing of doctor visits with a difference-in-...

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...

Higher levels of self-control in decision making have been linked to better psychosocial and physical health. A similar link to health outcomes has been reported for heart rate variability (HRV), a marker of physiological flexibility. Here, we sought to link these two, largely separate, research domains by testing the hypothesis that greater HRV would be associated with better...

Correlative evidence suggests that testosterone promotes dominance and aggression. However, causal evidence is scarce and offers mixed results. To investigate this relationship, we administered testosterone for 48h to 41 healthy young adult men in a within-subjects, double-blind placebo-controlled balanced crossover design. Subjects played the role of responders in an ultimatum game...