This paper analyzes the impact of the Austrian Regional Extended Benefit Program (REBP) on the labor market outcomes for elderly workers in Austria. The REBP extended entitlement to regular unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to a maximum of 209 weeks for elderly individuals in certain regions. This policy change created a large-scale quasi-experimental situation from which a lot can be learned about the impact of unemployment insurance rules on the dynamics of employment, unemployment, and wages. We find that the REBP led to a tremendous increase in unemployment which was due to both an increase in the inflow to and thenoutflow from unemployment. The REBP also induced a strong increase in early retirement and in many cases, in particular for steel workers, entering unemployment meant withdrawal from the labor force. Finally, we show that there were also non-negligible eects of extended benefits on the level and the distribution of wages.
Rational Choice Theory is often criticized to indoctrinate students in a negative, which is supported by some laboratory experiments. But do students of Rational Choice Theory really behave more selfishly? This paper presents evidence from a natural decision on voluntary donation at the University of Zurich. The analysis of the very large panel data set reaches significant different results than previous studies: Rational Choice Theory does not indoctrinate students. However, there are good other reasons to criticize Rational Choice Theory. The paper argues that ideas from other social sciences should be imported to improve the theory. Three elements are presented which lead to new and different policy conclusions.
Many people believe that economists in general are more selfish than other people and that this greater selfishness is due to economics education. This paper offers empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set on giving behaviour in connection with two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economics education does not make people act more selfishly. Rather, this natural experiment suggests that the particular behaviour of economists can be explained by a selection effect.
How are political events reflected in financial asset prices? Break points in sovereign debt prices are analyzed for Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Belgium during 1930-1948, using unique data from the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Unlike in countries in-volved in WWII, this market was unregulated. The outbreak of World War II heavily depressed prices of government bonds. Countries which were occupied (Belgium, Denmark and Norway) or under attack (Finland) saw their debt depreciate substantially. The battle of Stalingrad turns out indeed to be a turning-point of the war. This approach represents a complementary quantitative method to analyze the impact of political events.
"We use alternative assumptions about the divisibility of goods and money and thenability of agents to use lotteries on money to investigate to what extent the indivisi-bilitynof money is the cause for the typically ine .cient production and consumption decisions in search-theoretic models of money. Our framework potentially generates three types of inefficiencies: the no-trade inefficiency, where no trade takes place even though it would be socially efficient to trade; and the too-much-trade and too-little-trade inefficiencies, where the quantities produced and exchanged are either larger or smaller than what the solution to a social planner’s problem would mandate. It is shown that while the no-trade and the too-much-trade inefficiencies are caused by the indivisibility of money, the too-little-trade inefficiency remains even when money is divisible unless it is sufficiently valued."
"This paper studies the role of money in environments where in each meeting there isna double coincidence of real wants. Traders who meet at random finance their purchases through current production, the sale of divisible money or both. It is shown that in the absence of valued money if traders have asymmetric tastes for each other’s good, they produce and exchange socially ine .cient quantities. With valued money, however, traders exchange efficient quantities if the asymmetry of tastes is not too large. It is shown that the gains from trade in the monetary economy are strictly greater than those in the corresponding barter economy, that the Friedman rule holds, and that the allocation of resources in the monetary economy converges to the allocation in the barter economy as the growth rate of the money supply is increased."
This paper investigates the role of fiat money in decentralized markets, where producers have private information about the quality of the goods they supply. Money is divisible, terms of trade are determined endogenously, and agents can finance their consumption with money or with real production. When the fraction of high quality producers in the economy is given, money promotes the production of high-quality goods, which improves the quality mix and welfare unambiguously. When this fraction is endogenous, however, we find that money can be valued even though it decreases welfare relative to the barter equilibrium. The origin of this inefficiencynis that money provides consumption insurance to low-quality producers, which can result in a higher fraction of low-quality producers in the monetary equilibrium. Finally, we find that most often agents acquire more information in the monetary equilibrium. Consequently, money is welfare-enhancing because it promotes usefulnproduction and exchange, but not because it saves information costs.
"Tax compliance has been studied in economics by analysing the individual decision of a representative person between paying and evading taxes. A neglected aspect of tax compliance is the interaction of taxpayers and tax authorities. The relationship between the two actors can be understood as an implicit or ""psychological"" contract. Studies on tax evasion in Switzerland show that the more strongly the political participation rights arendeveloped, the more important this contract is, and the higher tax morale is. In this paper,nempirical evidence based on a survey of tax authorities of the 26 Swiss states (cantons) isnpresented, indicating that the differences in the treatment of taxpayers by tax authorities cannbe explained by differences in political participation rights as well."
Experimental games turned out to be remarkably productive tools for examining the nature of social preferences and social norms. This paper describes the methods and tools of experimental game theory and provides a selection of games that have been useful. We also discuss the role of evolutionary explanations of and social preference theory in organizing the data in a coherent way.
"The purpose of this paper is to give a global characterization of excess demand functions in a two period exchange economy with in-completenreal asset markets. We show that continuity, homogeneity and Walras’ law characterize the aggregate excess demand functions on any compact price set which maintains the dimension of the budget set."
