Publikationen

We construct a North-South product-cycle model of trade with fully-endogenous growth in which both countries experience unemployment due to union wage bargaining. We find that unilateral Northern trade liberalization reduces growth and increases unemployment in both countries, while unilateral Southern trade liberalization has the opposite effects. We show that the existence of labor unions matters for trade liberalization to have any effect on Northern innovation and worldwide growth. For empirically plausible parameter values, bilateral trade liberalization by equal amounts increases growth and reduces unemployment in both countries. Stronger Northern labor unions hurt both countries by reducing growth and increasing unemployment. However, stronger Southern labor unions exert a positive growth effect for both countries, while decreasing Northern unemployment and increasing Southern unemployment.

We examine the incentive effects of funding contracts on entrepreneurial effort decisions and allocative efficiency. We experiment with funding contracts that differ in the structure of investor repayment and, therefore, in the incentives for entrepreneurial effort provision. Theoretically the replacement of a standard debt contract by a repayment-equivalent non-monotonic contract reduces effort distortions and increases efficiency. Likewise the replacement of outside equity by a repayment-equivalent standard-debt contract mitigates distortions. We test both hypotheses in the laboratory. Our results reveal that the incentive effects of funding contracts need to be experienced before they reflect in observed behavior. With sufficient experience observed behavior is consistent with the theoretical predictions and supports both hypotheses. If we allow for entrepreneur-sided manipulations of the project outcome we find that non-monotonic contracts lose its appeal.

This paper uses experimental data to analyze how competitive behavior is influenced by coaching and peer observation. We study behavior in a sequential contest, considering information about the effort level of subjects in other contests (observation of peers) and information about the payoff-maximizing effort level (coaching) as treatment variables. Presentation of peer effort has a significant impact on the effort levels of first movers but not on second movers’ effort levels. The decisions of second movers were positively influenced (in terms of payoffs) by coaching when this information was presented alone; however, when coaching was presented in combination with peer observation, the quality of second-mover decisions deteriorated.

It is a well-known fact that financial returns exhibit conditional heteroscedasticity and fat tails. While the GARCH-type models are very popular in depicting the conditional heteroscedasticity, the α-stable distribution is a natural candidate for the conditional distribution of financial returns. The α-stable distribution is a generalization of the normal distribution and is described by four parameters, two of which deal with tail-thickness and asymmetry. However, practical implementation of α-stable distribution in finance applications has been limited by its estimation difficulties. In this paper, we propose an indirect approach of estimating GARCH models with α-stable innovations by using as auxiliary models GARCH-type models with Student's t distributed innovations. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence on the performance of the method within a series of Monte Carlo simulation studies and an empirical application to financial returns.

It is commonly believed that the possibility to sue privately for antitrust damages decreases the number of type II errors in enforcement at the cost of creating more type I errors. We extend the analysis by taking into account the fact that private parties often submit evidence during public prosecution. Such parties consider private suit as a partial substitute for public prosecution, as both imply desistance of the violation. The trial option might induce these parties to be less willing to contribute evidence to public cases. Private trials crowd out public prosecution and can have ambiguous effects on the number of enforcement errors.

This paper identifies a novel political-economy explanation for the observed variation in the cash and in-kind (basic health care, public housing or food stamps) mixture of social transfers. We put forward the hypothesis that the share of in-kind transfers is positively correlated with corruption in democratic countries. The argument is derived in a theoretical model which assumes that it is easier for politicians to appropriate cash transfers than in-kind transfers. Voters in corrupt countries know that cash transfers invite corrupt behavior and therefore they elect parties that opt for in-kind redistributive measures. The empirical analysis for 34 OECD countries over the 1984 – 2007 period provides robust evidence in favor of this hypothesis. Moreover, the positive correlation between the in-kind share of social transfers and perceived corruption is stronger for the “most democratic” OECD countries and in countries with specific institutional characteristics such as free media that further enhance democratic accountability.