infonet-economy

Empirical studies on the relationship between income and happiness commonly use standard ordered response models, the most well-known representatives being the ordered logit and the ordered probit. However, these models restrict the marginal probability effects by design, and therefore limit the analysis of distributional aspects of a change in income, that is, the study of whether...

The paper proposes a simple equilibrium model of venture capital, entrepreneurship and innovation. Venture capitalists not only finance but also advise start-up entrepreneurs and thereby add value to new firms. The paper demonstrates how a productive and active VC industry boosts innovation driven growth.

A nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) is performed on hospitals in the federal state of Saxony (Germany) and in Switzerland. This study is of interest from three points of view. First, contrary to most existing work, patient days are not treated as an output but as an input. Second, the usual DEA assumption of a homogeneous sample is tested and rejected for a large part of...

Insurance companies invest their wealth in financial markets. The wealth evolution strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavourable years, when indemnities to be paid to thenclients exceed collected premia. An investment strategy that does not take liquidity shocks into account, exposes insurance companies to...

We consider economies with additively separable utility functions and give conditions for the two-agents case under which the existencenof sunspot equilibria is equivalent to the occurrence of the transfer paradox.nThis equivalence enables us to show that sunspots cannot matter if the initial economy has a unique spot market equilibrium and there are only twoncommodities or if the...

In this study the effects of various types of rehabilitation programmes on labour market out-comes are estimated. A main feature of this study is that it jointly evaluates multiple treat-ments by nonparametric matching estimators. The study is based on a large sample of per-sons in western Sweden who are long-term sick and could participate in rehabilitation pro-grammes. Our results...

In den letzten Jahren haben sich die aussenwirtschaftspolitischen Parameter der USA teilweise stark geändert. Drei augenfällige Trends bestimmen seither die US-amerikanische Aussenwirtschaftspolitik: Erstens fliessen Sicherheitsüberlegungen seit den Terroranschlägen vom 11.September 2001 massiv in aussenwirtschaftliche Regelungen ein; zweitens schenken die USA der regionalen und...

One important motive for deregulating social health insurance is to encourage product innovation. For the first time, the cost savings achieved by non-US managed care plans that are attributable to product innovation are estimated, using a novel approach. Panel data from a major Swiss health insurer permits to infer health status, which can be used to predict health care expenditure...