infonet-economy

Social relations between humans critically depend on our affective experiences of others. Oxytocin enhances prosocial behavior, but its effect on humans’ affective experience of others is not known. We tested whether oxytocin influences affective ratings, and underlying
brain activity, of faces that have been aversively conditioned. Using a standard conditioning procedure, we...

In order to promote the diffusion of insurance contracts with managed care characteristics among Swiss citizens the Federal Council suggests that Parliament defines networks of integrated care (with budgetary responsibility) as part of the federal law on social health insurance. At this stage Parliament is still searching for an appropriate solution.

Applying stochastic frontier analysis, we estimate distance to frontier of countries in the production of success at the Summer Olympic Games since the 1950s. Our measures of success are medal shares and a broader concept including Olympic diplomas. Following Bernard and Busse (2004), population and GDP are used as inputs. While the impact of GDP is always positive, we show that the...

Most economic models are limited to analyzing the behavior of a representative agent and, consequently, make the implicit assumption that either individuals are homogeneous
or that individual heterogeneity does not matter for the aggregate outcome. However, recent empirical evidence in experimental economics indicates that under strategic complementarity a minority of...

This book concentrates on how small European countries coped with economic integration and disintegration during the twentieth century. Small countries had to adapt flexibly to the drastically changing conditions outside their borders. They had to find ways of maintaining their political autonomy notwithstanding their economic dependence, and they have been quite successful in...

Europe comprises a large number of large and small countries with varying internal rules and norms, and the differences are still remarkable.1 The literature on varieties of capitalism, for example, highlights common features for some of the European countries during specific periods of time, and even within the European Union not convergence, but instead uneasy rivalry, seems to...