Das Interesse an der Verteilung von Einkommen und Vermögen ist in jüngster Zeit wieder neu entbrannt. Nicht zuletzt, weil nach vielen Jahren der Stabilität die Ungleichheit in vielen Ländern wieder zunimmt. Auch in der Schweiz geniesst die Frage nach der Einkommens- und Vermögensverteilung in der öffentlichen und politischen Diskussion grosse Aufmerksamkeit. Die Analyse über die letzten 100 Jahre zeigt, dass im Ländervergleich das Niveau der Einkommen und Löhne in der Schweiz hoch ist, die Ungleichheit zwischen Arm und Reich wenig stark ausgeprägt ist und sich die Öffnung der Einkommensschere über die Zeit in engen Grenzen hält. Die Ausnahme bilden die Superreichen, deren Anteile in jüngster Zeit deutlich zugenommen haben. Die relativ egalitäre Primärverteilung der Einkommen und Löhne und die föderale Struktur mit ihrem Steuerwettbewerb führen dazu, dass Bedarf und Ausmass der Umverteilung relativ gering ausfallen. Als Kehrseite der Medaille ist die hohe Stabilität wohl ein Grund dafür, dass die Einkommensmobilität im internationalen Vergleich gering ausfällt. Dafür fällt das Durchschnittsniveau der Einkommen rekordhoch aus. Die gefundenen Aussagen gelten verstärkt für die Vermögen. Diese reagieren viel träger auf Einzelereignisse, weil sie über Jahrzehnte aufgebaut werden. Die anhaltende politische Stabilität und die berechenbare Wirtschaftspolitik haben der Schweiz neben sehr hohen Durchschnittsvermögen eine sehr persistente Vermögensverteilung beschert, womit sie unter Industrieländern eine grosse Ausnahme darstellt. Entsprechend ist die Vermögenskonzentration im internationalen Vergleich sehr hoch. Das Ausmass relativiert sich aber, wenn wir die für die Schweiz wichtigen Pensionskassenvermögen miteinbeziehen.
Increased competition for viewers’ time is threatening the viability of public-service broadcasters (PSBs) around the world. Changing regulations regarding advertising minutes might increase revenues, but little is known about the structure of advertising demand. To address this problem, we collect a unique dataset on monthly impacts (quantities) and prices of UK television channels between 2002 and 2009 to estimate the (inverse) demand for advertising on both public and commercial broadcasters. We find that increasing PSB advertising minutes to the level permitted for non-PSBs would increase PSB and industry revenue by 10.5% and 6.7%.
This paper presents models for search behavior and provides experimental evidence that behavioral heterogeneity in search is linked to heterogeneity in individual preferences. Observed search behavior is more consistent with a new model that assumes dynamic updating of utility reference points than with models that are based on expected-utility maximization. Specifically, reference point updating and loss aversion play a role for more than a third of the population. The findings are of practical relevance as well as of interest for researchers who incorporate behavioral heterogeneity into models of dynamic choice behavior in, for example, consumer economics, labor economics, finance, and decision theory.
Contingent sovereign debt can create important welfare gains. Nonetheless, there is almost no issuance today. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale use of state-contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of contracts whose value and due date depended on verifiable, exogenous events such as the arrival of silver fleets. We show that this allowed for effective risk sharing between the king and his bankers. The existence of state-contingent debt also sheds light on the nature of defaults—they were simply contingencies over which Crown and bankers had not contracted previously.
Throughout human history, informal sanctions by peers were ubiquitous and played a key role in the enforcement of social norms and the provision of public goods. However, a considerable body of evidence suggests that informal peer sanctions cause large collateral damage and efficiency costs. This raises the question whether peer sanctioning systems exist that avoid these costs and whether other, more centralized, punishment systems are superior and will be preferred by the people. Here, we show that efficient peer sanctioning without much need for costly punishment emerges quickly if we introduce two relevant features of social life into the experiment: (i) subjects can migrate across groups with different sanctioning institutions and (ii) they have the chance to achieve consensus about normatively appropriate behavior. We also show that subjects universally reject peer sanctioning without a norm consensus opportunity –an institution that has hitherto dominated research in this field – in favor of our efficient peer sanctioning institution or an equally efficient institution where they delegate the power to sanction to an elected judge. Migration opportunities and normative consensus building are key to the quick emergence of an efficient culture of universal cooperation because the more prosocial subjects populate the two efficient institutions first, elect prosocial judges (if institutionally possible), and immediately establish a social norm of high cooperation. This norm appears to guide subjects’ cooperation and punishment choices, including the virtually complete removal of antisocial punishment when judges make the sanctioning decision.
This article is based on the presidential address delivered at the EEA Annual Congress 2016. It discusses China’s institutional and economic transformation through the lens of the model of growth and convergence developed in Acemoglu, Aghion, and Zilibotti (JEEA 2006), which emphasizes the dichotomy between investment- and innovation-led growth. The economic reforms introduced in the 1980s and 1990s have enabled the Chinese economy to grow at historically unprecedented rates through fostering investment, reallocation, and technology adoption from abroad. The Chinese stimulus package introduced in 2008 appears to have prolonged the longevity of China’s investment-driven growth beyond its optimal point. Over the last decade, China has activated the engine of innovation-led growth. The article discusses the virtues and limits of such ongoing transition, based on research in progress using firm-level data on R&D and productivity growth. Finally, it provides an appraisal of the institutional and policy reforms that are necessary for China to continue on its path of rapid convergence.
While smooth exact potential games are easily characterized in terms of the cross-derivatives of players' payoff functions, an analogous differentiable characterization of ordinal or generalized ordinal potential games has been elusive for a long time. In this paper, it is shown that the existence of a generalized ordinal potential in a smooth game with multi-dimensional strategy spaces is crucially linked to the semipositivity (Fiedler and Ptak, 1966) of a modified Jacobian matrix on the set of interior strategy profiles at which at least two first-order conditions hold. Our findings imply, in particular, that any generalized ordinal potential game must exhibit pairwise strategic complements or substitutes at any interior Cournot-Nash equilibrium. Moreover, provided that there are more than two players, the cross-derivatives at any interior equilibrium must satisfy a rather stringent equality constraint. The two conditions, which may be conveniently condensed into a local variant of the differentiable condition for weighted potential games, are made explicit for sum-aggregative games, symmetric games, and two-person zero-sum games. For the purpose of illustration, the results are applied to classic games, including probabilistic all-pay contests with heterogeneous valuations, models of mixed oligopoly, and Cournot games with a dominant firm.
In this paper, I empirically investigate the presence of spillover effects resulting from the strengthening of law enforcement against corruption and organized crime in local governments. Specifically, I take advantage of an Italian law that gives power to the central government to replace democratically elected municipal officials who are potentially connected with mafia with a commission of non-elected administrators. Fixed effects model estimates that focus on a sample of municipalities from three Italian regions (Campania, Calabria and Sicilia) for the period 1998 to 2013 show that the city council dismissal of a municipality fosters a reduction in public investments in neighboring municipalities. Additional empirical evidence suggests that this result could be explained by the presence of law enforcement spillovers potentially reducing misconducts in neighboring municipalities.
Profit taxation affects corporate investment decisions through several channels. This paper focuses on the impact of corporate income flat tax reforms on businesses' location choices. Since 1990, Swiss states (cantons) have been switching from a graduated to a flat tax rate scheme on profits. The paper assesses the effects of such a reform on the number of establishments by computing a difference-in-differences estimation. Our results show a negative impact on the number of firms in a given jurisdiction. Interestingly, the effect is considerably larger for riskier firms, suggesting the presence of an insurance effect from progressive taxation for risk- averse entrepreneurs.
