On externalities related to the use of exhaustible resources

We are grateful to our colleague Friedel Bolle and two anonymous referees for useful comments on earlier versions of the paper. The usual disclaimer applies.     

What and How Long Does It Take to Get Tenure? The Case of Economics and Business Administration in Austria,Germany and Switzerland

Abstract. This paper investigates the determinants of tenure decisions in Germany, Austria and the German‐speaking part of Switzerland for professorships in economics, business administration and related fields. Our dataset comprises candidates who were awarded tenure as well as those who were eligible but were not tenured. We show that business candidates have a higher probability of being tenured than economists. Youth, marital status and publications matter; gender and children do not. The market for first appointments in economics relies much more on publication performance than the market for business administration.     

如何认识体验经济

一、体验经济的提出 自1998年美国Strategic Horizons LLP公司两位创始人B.Joseph Pine和JamesH.Gilmore在同年<哈佛商业评论>(Harvard Business Review)7/8月号期刊上发表<欢迎进入体验经济>(Welcome to the experience economy)一文以及1999年由哈佛商学院出版社出版两人合著的<体验经济>(The Experience Economy)一书以来,体验经济的提法日益受到人们的关注,尤其是在IT业更是备受青睐.然而值得回味的是,在之前近30年,著名未来学家阿尔文·托夫勒于1970年在其所著的<未来的冲击>一书中,虽早已提到继服务业发展之后,体验业将成为经济的支柱,但一直没有引起人们的注意.究其原因,一方面是因为托夫勒先生虽然提到继服务经济发展之后体验经济将会出现,但没有象前面提到的两位美国企业家那样作深入细致的分析;另一方面更重要的原因在于,世纪之交一系列经济和社会环境的变化,使得体验经济的重提,恰逢其时.那么有哪些变化使得体验经济的概念在世界范围内能够迅速传播呢?大致说来,主要有以下几个方面:     

Spatial Competition with an Outside Good and Distributed Reservation Prices

In this paper, we analyze spatial competition within the framework of a Hotelling model with quadratic transportation costs and an outside option. The new feature of our approach is that consumers are uniformly distributed not only along the Hotelling line but also with regard to reservation prices. It turns out that in this particular model, duopolists always locate their shops exactly at the first and third quartile of the consumer distribution – i.e., at the socially optimal locations. Moreover, with uniformly distributed reservation prices, less than seventy percent of the consumers buy the good, and profits are less than fifteen percent of those in the standard model without an outside option. Received February 7, 2001; revised version received March 27, 2002 Published online: November 11, 2002     

Social preferences and voting: An exploration using a novel preference revealing mechanism

Public referenda are frequently used to determine the provision of public goods. As public programs have distributional consequences, a compelling question is what impact, if any, do social preferences have on voting behavior. This paper explores this issue using laboratory experiments wherein voting outcomes lead to a known distribution of net benefits across participants. Preferences are elicited using a novel Random Price Voting Mechanism (RPVM), which is more efficient in eliciting preferences than a dichotomous choice referendum but gives consistent results. Results suggest that social preferences, in particular a social efficiency motive, lead to economically meaningful deviations from selfish voting choices and increase the likelihood that welfare-enhancing programs are implemented.     

News and correlations of CEEC-3 financial markets

We employ DCC-MGARCH models to investigate conditional correlations between six CEEC-3 financial markets. In general, the highest correlations exist between Hungary and Poland in foreign exchange and stock markets. Short-term money markets are somewhat isolated from each other. We find that the associations of CEEC-3 exchange rates versus euro are weaker than those versus the US dollar. The persistence of the effect of shocks on the time-varying correlations is strongest for foreign exchange and stock markets, indicating a tendency toward contagion. In searching for the origins of financial market volatility in the CEEC-3, we uncover some evidence of Granger-causality on the foreign exchange markets. Finally, using a pool model, we investigate the impact of euro area, US, and CEEC-3 news on the correlations. Apart from ECB monetary policy news, we observe no broad effects of international news on correlations; instead, local news exerts an influence, which suggests a dominance of country- or market-specific circumstances.     

Estimation of treatment effects: recent developments and applications

The literature on the estimation of treatment effects has matured in economics. The potential outcomes framework guides the estimation of the causal effect of economic choices or policy interventions. The application of methods from the treatment effects literature has spread from the analysis of the effects of labor market programs and the wage return to education to other areas in economics. This special issue involves methodological developments and state-of-the art applications of methods to estimate treatment effects in various areas of economics. The contributions illustrate the emphasis within the treatment effects literature on the separate but related issues of heterogeneous treatment effects and identification. The careful, high-quality substantive applications collected here show just how much applied work on policy-relevant topics has benefitted from the methodological developments in the treatment effects literature. At the same time, many of the substantive papers make important methodological contributions as well.