This study is the first to analyze economic time series of one of the world’s most preeminent traditional events, the most popular beer festival, and the largest regular fair in the world: Munich Oktoberfest. Since people from around the world attend this cultural festival as of the first decades of the 20th century, it represents a unique opportunity to analyze elasticities of consumption both in the short and medium run (i.e. at business cycle frequencies) and in the
long-run. Against the backdrop of two secularly increasing demand factors –a rise in real disposable incomes and an increased amount of leisure– we use a novel data set to study elasticities of the consumption of beer and food and the revenues of breweries. To account for asymmetries we apply partial sum decompositions in an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to estimate elasticities for state, national, European and world GDP.
We analyze the impact of bank internationalization on domestic market power (Lerner index) and risk for German banks. Risk is measured by the official declaration of regulatory authorities that a bank is distressed. We distinguish the volume of foreign assets, the number of foreign countries, and different modes of foreign entry. Our analysis has three main results. First, higher market power is associated with lower risk. Second, holding assets in many countries reduce market power at home, but banks with a higher share of foreign assets exhibit higher market power. Third, bank internationalization is only weakly related to bank risk.
Die gesetzliche Unfallversicherung wurde im Rahmen des Unfallversicherungsmodernisierungsgesetzes (UVMG) zum 1.1.2009 grundlegend reformiert. Ein wesentliches Ziel der Reformen war es, durch Fusionen der Versiche-rungsträger die Verwaltungs- und Verfahrenskosten je Versicherten zu reduzieren, also Skaleneffekte zu realisieren. Allerdings gab es zum Zeitpunkt der Reform keinerlei empirische Evidenz, dass bedeutsame Skaleneffekte zu erwar-ten wären. Basierend auf Daten der Jahre 1998-2007 wird die Frage untersucht, ob große Unfallkassen geringere Verwaltungs- und Verfahrenskosten je Versicherten aufwenden müssen als kleine. Mittels Paneldatenanalyse kann über mehrere Spezifikationen hinweg robust gezeigt werden, dass die Höhe der Verwaltungs- und Verfahrenskos-ten je Versicherten negativ von der Größe des Trägers (gemessen durch die Anzahl der Versicherten) abhängt. Im statistischen Mittel sinken die Verwaltungs- und Verfahrenskosten je Versicherten um ca. 33 Cent, wenn die Anzahl der Versicherten um 100.000 zunimmt. Bei mittleren Kosten von ca. 6,54 € je Versicherten über den betrachteten Zeitraum und durchschnittlich 960.000 Versicherten je Unfallkasse ist dieses Einsparpotential erheblich. Bei einer Steigerung der Kassengröße um ca. 600.000 Versicherte (um eine Standardabweichung) besteht damit ein Einspar-potenzial von ca. 30%.
We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of workers, distortions to capital accumulation, directed technical change, costly adoption and spillovers from the world technology frontier. Despite its parsimonious parametrization, our empirical model provides a good fit of GDP data for up to 86 countries in 1970 and 122 countries in 2000. Removing barriers to technology adoption would increase the output per worker of the average non-OECD country relative to the US from 0.19 to 0.61, while increasing skill premia in all countries. Removing barriers to trade in goods amplifies income disparities, induces skill-biased technology adoption and increases skill premia in the majority of countries. These results are reverted if trade liberalization is coupled with international IPR protection.
Two pension reforms in Austria increased the early retirement age (ERA) from 60 to 62 for men and from 55 to 58.25 for women. We find that raising the ERA increased employment by 9.75 percentage points among affected men and by 11 percentage points among affected women. The reforms had large spillover effects on the unemployment insurance program but negligible effects on disability insurance claims. Specifically, unemployment increased by 12.5 percentage points among men and by 11.8 percentage points among women. The employment response was largest among high-‐‑wage and healthy workers, while low-‐‑wage and less healthy workers either continued to retire early via disability benefits or bridged the gap to the ERA via unemployment benefits. Taking spillover effects and additional tax revenues into account, we find that for a typical birthyear cohort a one year increase in the ERA resulted in a reduction of net government expenditures of 107 million euros for men and of 122 million euros for women.
Global games with endogenous information often exhibit multiple equilibria. In this paper we show how one can nevertheless identify useful predictions that are robust across all equilibria and that could not have been delivered in the common-knowledge counterparts of these games. Our analysis is conducted within a flexible family of games of regime change, which have been used to model, inter alia, speculative currency attacks, debt crises, and political change. The endogeneity of information originates in the signaling role of policy choices. A novel procedure
of iterated elimination of non-equilibrium strategies is used to deliver probabilistic predictions that an outside observer—an econometrician—can form under arbitrary equilibrium selections. The sharpness of these predictions improves as the noise gets smaller, but disappears in the
complete-information version of the model.
Deficits in impulse control are discussed as key mechanisms for major worldwide health problems such as drug addiction and obesity. For example, obese subjects have difficulty controlling their impulses to overeat when faced with food items. Here, we investigated the role of neural impulse control mechanisms for dietary success in middle-aged obese subjects. Specifically, we used a food-specific delayed gratification paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure eating-related impulse-control in middle-aged obese subjects just before they underwent a twelve-week low calorie diet. As expected, we found that subjects with higher behavioral impulse control subsequently lost more weight. Furthermore, brain activity before the diet in VMPFC and DLPFC correlates with subsequent weight loss. Additionally, a connectivity analysis revealed that stronger functional connectivity between these regions is associated with better dietary success and impulse control. Thus, the degree to which subjects can control their eating impulses might depend on the interplay between control regions (DLPFC) and regions signaling the reward of food (VMPFC). This could potentially constitute a general mechanism that also extends to other disorders such as drug addiction or alcohol abuse.
Individual political preferences as expressed, for instance, in votes or donations are fundamental to democratic societies. However, the relevance of deliberative processing for political preferences has been highly debated, putting automatic processes in the focus of attention. Based on this notion, the present study tested whether brain responses reflect participants' preferences for politicians and their associated political parties in the absence of explicit deliberation and attention. Participants were instructed to perform a demanding visual fixation task while their brain responses were measured using fMRI. Occasionally, task-irrelevant images of German politicians from two major competing parties were presented in the background while the distraction task was continued. Subsequent to scanning, participants' political preferences for these politicians and their affiliated parties were obtained. Brain responses in distinct brain areas predicted automatic political preferences at the different levels of abstraction: activation in the ventral striatum was positively correlated with preference ranks for unattended politicians, whereas participants' preferences for the affiliated political parties were reflected in activity in the insula and the cingulate cortex. Using an additional donation task, we showed that the automatic preference-related processing in the brain extended to real-world behavior that involved actual financial loss to participants. Together, these findings indicate that brain responses triggered by unattended and task-irrelevant political images reflect individual political preferences at different levels of abstraction.
Optimal decision-making often requires exercising self-control. A growing fMRI literature has implicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in successful self-control, but due to the limitations inherent in BOLD measures of brain activity, the neurocomputational role of this region has not been resolved. Here we exploit the high temporal resolution and whole-brain coverage of event-related potentials (ERPs) to test the hypothesis that dlPFC affects dietary self-control through two different mechanisms: attentional filtering and value modulation. Whereas attentional filtering of sensory input should occur early in the decision process, value modulation should occur later on, after the computation of stimulus values begins. Hungry human subjects were asked to make food choices while we measured neural activity using ERP in a natural condition, in which they responded freely and did not exhibit a tendency to regulate their diet, and in a self-control condition, in which they were given a financial incentive to lose weight. We then measured various neural markers associated with the attentional filtering and value modulation mechanisms across the decision period to test for changes in neural activity during the exercise of self-control. Consistent with the hypothesis, we found evidence for top-down attentional filtering early on in the decision period (150-200 ms poststimulus onset) as well as evidence for value modulation later in the process (450-650 ms poststimulus onset). We also found evidence that dlPFC plays a role in the deployment of both mechanisms.
This Research Topic covers issues in psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience investigating the neural structures and mechanisms underlying approach, and avoidance behavior in the face of rewards and punishments. The objective is to understand the nature of critical differences and asymmetries between the ways that appetitive and aversive outcomes are processed by the brain. A number of topics are covered, such as the development of economic models integrating costs and benefits into a single value, neuroimaging approaches of appetitive and aversive conditioning, reward-punishment interactions, pain and defensive behavior, the role of dopamine neurons in aversive conditioning, and the interactions between serotonin and dopamine in punishment, pain, and aversion. The neural bases of reward-punishment interactions are of great interest to a broad readership because of the fundamental role of dopamine and serotonin in a number of motivational and decision processes, and because of their theoretical and clinical implications for understanding dysfunctions of these two systems. Findings in this research field are also important to basic neuroscientists interested in the computational processes of pain and aversive learning and cognitive psychologists working on conditioning/reinforcement. Punishment-based decision making and reward processing cover a wide range of topics and levels of analysis, from basic neural mechanisms and computational models of appetitive and aversive conditioning, to the system neuroscience level. The contributions to this Frontiers Research Topic in Decision Neuroscience are forward-looking assessments of the current and future issues faced by researchers.
