infonet-economy

This paper develops a simple reduced form model of two-way network competition with linear retail pricing. Using the techniques of supermodular games, it is demonstrated that the most important results from the existing literature do not depend on routinely invoked assumptions, such as specific functional forms or the symmetry of the network operators. In particular, it is...

Mit der Reform des Arbeitslosenversicherungsgesetzes im Jahre 1996 nahm die Bedeutung der arbeitsmarktlichen Massnahmen (AMM) in der Schweiz stark zu. Die vorliegende Studie ist ein Teilprojekt des gesamtschweizerischen Evaluationsprogramms der AMM, welches durch die Aufsichtskommission des Ausgleichsfonds der Arbeitslosenversicherung im Juli 1997 genehmigt wurde. Da die...

This paper analyzes the impact of formal training on worker mobility. Using data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey, we find that on-the-job search activities and, to a smaller extent, actual job separations are significantly affected by both employer-provided and general training. Moreover, while the separation probability of searching workers is strongly affected by previous firm-...

The paper analyzes the economic structure of rat races, which either emerge in signaling (as a means of handling informational problems in labor markets) or in genuine tournaments. The unifying element of such contests is a rank-order reward structure. The pervasive phenomenon that contestants compete with too much effort or wasteful investments, cannot be explained in a satisfying...

The British pound left the ERM on 16 September 1992 after a period of turbulence. UK monetary policy soon shifted to lower short interest rates and an inflation target was announced. This paper uses daily option prices to estimate how the market's probability distribution of the future marks/pound exchange rate and UK and German interest rates changed over the summer and autumn...

Michael Porter and others have recently argued that suitable environmental regulations are likely to induce cost-reducing innovations. We analyze under which conditions such arguments might be consistent with microeconomic analysis, and under which additional conditions the firms' benefits might exceed the costs. It turns out that this requires fairly specific conditions.

This article's point of departure is that the individual has to manage three stochastic assets, namely health, wealth, and wisdom (skills), which tend to be positively correlated. It shows that the unexpected components of insurance payments should be negatively correlated for minimizing total asset volatility. The empirical finding is that in the United States, Japan, and...

The author reports on a series of experiments designed to investigate the factor of incentive mechanisms in the case of private provisions of public goods. In the Control treatment, there was no mechanism so that subjects faced strong free-riding incentives. In the so-called Falkinger mechanism treatment, the author implemented the Falkinger mechanism. The studies explored the impact...