Wage subsidies, work incentives, and the reform of the Austrian welfare system

We analyze the employment and income effects of a needs-based minimum benefit system (“Bedarfsorientierte Mindestsicherung”) which has recently been introduced in Austria. The aim of this reform was to reduce poverty as well as to increase work incentives for recipients of social assistance. On the basis of a behavioral microsimulation model we show that this new system slightly increases employment but reduces incomes for the poorest households remaining unemployed. As an alternative, we analyze a budgetary neutral reform proposal which reduces financial incentives for marginal employment and provides a wage subsidy rewarding working longer hours. This alternative reform would yield larger positive employment effects, but more households would suffer from income losses. Overall, income inequality and poverty are affected little, however, both under the new social welfare system and the alternative reform proposal.     

Evolution of trading strategies in a market with heterogeneously informed agents

We present an agent-based simulation of an asset market with heterogeneously informed agents. Genetic programming is applied to optimize the agents’ trading strategies. After optimization, insiders are the only agents able to generate small systematic above-average returns. For all other agents, genetic programming finds a rich variety of trading strategies that are predominantly based on exclusive subsets of their information. This limits their price impact and prevents them from making systematic losses. The resulting low noise renders market prices as largely informationally efficient.     

Dynamics of self-rated health and selective mortality

Self-rated health status (SRHS) is one of the most frequently used health measures in empirical health economics. This article analyzes the first seven waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and finds that (1) all available lags have decreasing but significant predictive power for current SRHS and (2) SRHS and future mortality are strongly related which leads to a specific selection problem known as survivorship bias. A parsimonious joint model with an autocorrelated latent health component in both the SRHS and the mortality equation is suggested. It is better able to capture the empirical facts than commonly used models including random effects and/or state dependence and better able to correct the survivorship bias than commonly used strategies such as inverse probability weighting.     

The Strategic Positioning of Store Brands in Retailer–Manufacturer Negotiations

Store brands are the only brands for which the retailer is responsible not onlyfor promotion, shelf placement, and pricing, but also for positioning the brandin product space. We argue that retailers strongly value control over store brandpositioning because they will be unable to source a national brand with theirdesired product positioning. This is because retailers have an incentive to positionstore brands as close substitutes to leading national brands – a location in productspace which other national brand manufacturers would not find profitable. We presentempirical evidence that is consistent with the results of our model.     

Can Socialism Use Markets?

In Economic Affairs, January-March 1985, the Editor invited socialist writers of varying kinds to debate the extent to which markets are workable under socialism or capitalism. Two British commentators - the Political Editor of the New Statesman, and a Fellow of Ruskin College, Oxford - and the President of the Hungarian Economics Association discuss the compatibility of choice in the market with state.     

Die Messung des technischen Fortschritts innerhalb des gesamtwirtschaftlichen Wachstumsprozesses

Ohne ZusammenfassungMit 6 TextabbildungenSchluß aus Band XXV, Heft 1–2     

The effect of corporate diversification on credit risk: new evidence from European credit default swap spreads

This article investigates the impact of corporate diversification on credit risk. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper to use credit default swap (CDS) spreads instead of bond yield or revalued book values to test the risk‐reduction hypothesis. The analysis relies upon a sample of STOXX^® EUROPE 600 index members and covers the years 2010–2014. After controlling for various CDS‐ and firm‐specific variables, we find that diversification strategies do not significantly lower CDS premiums. Multilevel mediation analysis further shows that information asymmetries overcompensate the risk‐reducing effects resulting from corporate diversification.