This paper provides further evidence on the recent increase in international consumption risk sharing. We show that this increase is more pronounced among EU and EMU countries than among non-E(M)U industrialised countries. We also show that the patterns of international but intra-European risk
sharing have started to diverge from what is found at the level of the OECD as a whole. During the 1990s, capital income flows have started to play a relatively more important role between European countries, whereas the increase in international risk sharing among the OECD as a whole is almost exclusively driven by better consumption smoothing through the accumulation or decumulation of foreign assets. This EMU effect on the pattern of risk sharing survives once we control for differences in international portfolio holdings: while we find that countries with higher equity cross-holdings also tend to share more risk through capital income flows there remains an independent EMU-effect on the way how risk is shared. While it is too early to evaluate these findings conclusively, we discuss some possible interpretations
and their implications for economic policy.
This paper studies the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and income - the consumption-wealth ratio - based on German data from 1980 to 2003. We find that departures from this long-run relationship
mainly predict adjustments in income. The German consumption-wealth ratio also contains considerable forecasting power for a range of business cycle indicators, including the unemployment rate. This finding is in contrast to earlier studies for some of the Anglo-Saxon economies that have shown that the consumption-wealth ratio reverts to its long-run mean mainly through subsequent adjustments in asset prices. While the German consumption
wealth ratio contains little information about future changes in German asset prices, we report that the U.S. consumption-wealth ratio has considerable forecasting power for the German stock market. One explanation of these findings is that in Germany - due to structural differences in the financial and pension systems - the share of publicly traded equity in aggregate household wealth is much smaller than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. We discuss the implications of our results for the measurement of a potential wealth effect on consumption.
Relative Einkommensunterschiede lösen innerhalb einer Referenzgruppe oftmals Neid aus. Damit wird das soziale Verhalten und die individuelle Leistungsbereitschaft beeinflusst. In der ökonomischen Forschung ist dennoch bislang der Zusammenhang zwischen relativen Einkommensunterschieden und individueller Leistung wenig untersucht worden. Ein wesentlicher Grund dafür ist sicherlich die schwierige Messbarkeit von „Leistung“. Unser
Beitrag analysiert den Einfluss von relativen Einkommensunterschieden auf die Leistung von Fußballprofis der deutschen Bundesliga, weil deren Leistung erfolgreich erfasst wurde. Insgesamt werden 1040 Spieler über einen Zeitraum von 8 Spielzeiten zwischen 1995 und 2004 untersucht. Relative Einkommensunterschiede zwischen Mannschaftskollegen erweisen sich als entscheidender Einfluss auf die individuelle Leistung der Spieler. Eine
Verschlechterung in der relativen Einkommensposition vermindert ceteris paribus die individuelle Leistungsbereitschaft. Eine höhere Einkommensungleichheit verstärkt solche positionalbedingten Externalitäten. Auch eine Veränderung der Teamkonstellation bewirkt signifikante Änderungen der individuellen Leistungen.
Terrorism has large social costs that are difficult to quantify for the well-known problems of eliciting people’s preferences for public goods. We use the LSA to assess these costs in utility and monetary terms. Based on combined cross-section time-series data, we estimate the costs of terrorism for France and the British Isles. We find large negative effects of terrorism on life satisfaction that translate into considerable compensating surpluses for a hypothetical reduction in terrorism, in particular for the serious conflict in Northern Ireland. The effects of terrorism are robust and differ across groups in accordance with prior expectations.
This paper explores a general model of the evolution and adaption of hedonic utility. It is shown that optimal utility will be increasing strongly in regions where choices have to be made often and decision mistakes have a severe impact on fitness. Several applications are suggested. In the context of intertemporal preferences, the model offers an evolutionary explanation for the existence of conflicting short- and long-run interests that lead to dynamic inconsistency. Concerning attitudes toward risk, an evolutionary explanation is given for S-shaped value functions that adjust to the decision maker’s environment.
The article discusses and analyzes data from several economic experiments in a household sur-vey with mothers of preschool children. The researchers measured competitiveness by giving the subjects the choice between competing in a tournament or receiving a piece rate for a real effort task. The subjects also participated in lottery choices, which enabled the researchers to assess their risk preferences. The relationship between social preferences and competitiveness in the sample of mothers of preschool children was analyzed. The hypothesis that egalitarian subjects aren't as likely to self-select into competitive environments, which can produce winners and los-ers, was tested. A negative relationship between egalitarian choices and self-selection into com-petition was found.
Systematic differences in decision making between genders have been discovered in both competitive and pro-social environments. These contexts, however, have been previously studied in isolation while in naturally occurring settings pro-social and competitive pressures often overlap in economically meaningful ways. Here we report data from an experiment involving German schoolchildren where dictators are in one town and receivers in another. Our experiment informs decision making in social environments that include differing levels of competitive pressure. We find that competitive pressure significantly mitigates pro-sociality in boys, while it does not affect girls’ propensities to make fair decisions. This finding is robust to controlling for social and cognitive factors, and it may shed additional light on the evolutionary roots of human social preferences.
Purpose. To study extraocular muscle (EOM) function, the local physiologic contraction and elongation (deformation) along human horizontal EOMs were quantified using motion-encoded MRI. Methods. Eleven subjects (healthy right eye) gazed at a target that moved horizontally in a sinusoidal fashion (period 2s, amplitude +/-20 degrees ), during MR imaging with an optimized protocol. In addition, EOM longitudinal deformation of two patients with Duane's syndrome type I were analyzed. The horizontal EOMs and the optic nerve were tracked through 15 time frames and their local deformation was calculated. Eight segments were separated along the EOMs and compared for left-to-right and right-to-left eye movements. Results. In healthy subjects, the maximal EOM deformation was situated at approximately 2/3 of the muscle lengths from the scleral insertions. The EOM deformations were similar for the entire movement range as well as in both movement directions. In two patients with Duane's syndrome type I, the abnormal innervation of lateral rectus muscle affected specific EOM segments only. The posterior muscle segments contracted and the anterior muscle segments relaxed during adduction. Conclusions. Motion-encoded MRI is a useful technique to advance the understanding of the physiology and pathophysiology of EOMs in humans during eye movement.
The attentional blink (AB) documents a particularly strong case of visual attentional competition, in which subjects' ability to identify a second target (T2) is significantly impaired when it is presented with a short SOA after a first target (T1). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the impact of the AB on visual activity in individually defined retinotopic representations of the target stimuli. Our results show reduction of neural response in V3 and marginally in V2 and V1, paralleling the behavioral AB effect. Reduction of visual activity was accompanied by reduced neural response in the inferior parietal cortex. This indicates that attentional competition modulates activity in higher-order parietal regions and the early visual cortex, providing a plausible neural basis of the behavioral AB effect.
