infonet-economy

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal scale of local jurisdictions (cantons) in Switzerland applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the years 2000 to 2004. Aggregate output performance indicators for four local government activities (administration, education, health, and transportation) are used to measure technical and scale efficiency and to derive DEA scores....

Illicit drug use is prevalent around the world. While the nature of the market makes it difficult to determine the total sales worldwide with certainty, estimates suggest sales are around 150 billion dollar a year in the United States alone. Among illicit drugs marijuana is the most commonly used, where the US government spends upwards of $7.7 billion per year in enforcement of the...

We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Ugandaduring the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document large causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-05. We exploit two waves of survey data from Afrobarometer 2000 and 2008, including information on socioeconomic...

We explore gender differences in preferences for competition and risk among children aged 9-12 in Colombia and Sweden, two countries differing in gender equality according to macro indices. We include four types of tasks that vary in gender stereotyping when looking at competitiveness: running, skipping rope, math and word search. We find that boys and girls are equally competitive...

The paper proposes a new estimator for the fixed effects ordered logit model. In contrast to existing methods, the new procedure allows estimating the thresholds. The empirical relevance and simplicity of implementation is illustrated in an application to the effect of unemployment on life satisfaction.

This paper examines a dynamic stochastic economy with a benevolent government that cannot commit to future policies. Following Phelan and Stacchetti (2001), we consider sequential sustainable equilibria (SSE). We numerically solve for the set of equilibrium payoffs, and investigate whether the time consistency problem of capital income tax is quantitatively important. For a...

Two pension reforms in Austria increased the early retirement age from 60 to 62 for men and from 55 to 58.25 for women. The reforms reduced early retirement by 18.9 percentage points among affected men aged 60-62 and by 22.3 percentage points among affected women aged 55-58.25. The associated increase in employment was merely 6.8 percentage points among men and 10.1 percentage points...

We show that professional soccer players exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that a player breaches the rules of the game, measured by the referee’s assignment of cards, with a significantly higher probability if his team is behind the expected match outcome,...