Self-employment,educational attainment and employment protection legislation

We analyse how educational attainment and employment protection influence an individual's decision to become self-employed. By altering expected income from dependent employment, employment protection is likely to affect an individual's choice of occupation, although such a link has not been established in the literature so far. We argue that an interaction between an individual's educational attainment and the institution of employment protection exists when it comes to the decision regarding whether to become self-employed. Based on survey data from OECD countries, we find evidence for a negative interaction, and conclude that only after taking this interaction into account can the effect of employment protection and educational attainment on self-employment rates be assessed.     

From mind to market: A global,dynamic analysis of R&D

Existing models of R&D are not easily reconciled with four observable aspects of R&D: initial technologies (ideas) need to be developed further, only a minority of initial ideas are successfully brought to the market, production and process innovations take place simultaneously (whereby, initially, there is no production at all), and process innovations are implemented for technologies that are destined to leave the market. We present a detailed bifurcation analysis for a dynamic model of R&D that captures these observations in one, unifying framework. As we provide a global analysis, we do not limit initial technologies to carry marginal costs that are below the choke price. We show that there always exists a critical value of initial marginal cost above which the firm does not initiate any (R&D) activity; the path to the saddle-point steady state is never globally optimal. We also sketch some tentative policy implications of our analysis.     

COGNITIVE EMPATHY IN CONFLICT SITUATIONS

Two individuals are involved in a conflict situation in which preferences are ex ante uncertain. Although they eventually learn their own preferences, they have to pay a small cost if they want to secretly learn their opponent's preferences. We show that there is an interval with an upper bound less than 1 and lower bound greater than zero such that, for sufficiently small positive costs of information acquisition, in any Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the resulting game of incomplete information the probability of acquiring information about the opponent's preferences is within this interval.     

Managerial Payoff and Gift-Exchange in the Field

Review of Industrial Organization - We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift-exchange wage and the effect of the worker’s effort on the manager’s payoff....     

What is it going to cost? Empirical evidence from a systematic literature review of audit fee determinants

Management Review Quarterly - The audit market is subject to ongoing regulation to ensure or improve the quality of audit services. For this reason, international research on the audit market is...     

Zwei Jahre im Krisenmodus — die kommunalen Finanzen bleiben trotzdem stabil

Wirtschaftsdienst - Die kommunalen Finanzen stehen seit Beginn der Coronakrise unter besonderer Beobachtung. Die deutsche Politik hat zurecht erkannt, dass bei der Bekämpfung der Krise eine...     

Financial Repression — Ein neues Umfeld für die Finanzm?rkte?

High levels of debt caused by the financial crisis are forcing countries to take measures to reduce debt. Financial repression is a debt reduction opportunity based on measures imposed on the financial markets by governments which manifests itself primarily in lower real interest rates. Financial repression is regarded as another characteristic of a “new normality” in the global economy with low potential growth rates and low interest rates, high levels of public debt as a result of the financial crisis. The article describes this phenomenon and attempts to evaluate its empirical relevance.