Stabilitätseffekte konjekturaler Variation und steigender Grenzkosten in Preisoligopolen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Evolutionary stable stock markets

Summary. This paper shows that a stock market is evolutionary stable if and only if stocks are evaluated by expected relative dividends. Any other market can be invaded in the sense that there is a portfolio rule that, when introduced on the market with arbitrarily small initial wealth, increases its market share at the incumbents expense. This mutant portfolio rule changes the asset valuation in the course of time. The stochastic wealth dynamics in our evolutionary stock market model is formulated as a random dynamical system. Applying this theory, necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the evolutionary stability of portfolio rules when relative dividend payoffs follow a stationary Markov process. These local stability conditions lead to a unique evolutionary stable portfolio rule according to which assets are evaluated by expected relative dividends (with respect to the objective probabilities).Received: 7 October 2003, Revised: 18 January 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: G11, D52, D81. Correspondence to: Klaus Reiner Schenk-HoppéWe are grateful to Jarrod Wilcox and William Ziemba for valuable comments. Financial support by the national center of competence in research Financial Valuation and Risk Management is gratefully acknowledged. The national centers in research are managed by the Swiss National Science Foundation on behalf of the federal authorities.     

Die Auswirkung von Globalisierung von Versicherungsmärkten aus medizinisch-demographischer Sicht

The opening of national life insurance markets is prevented by the fear, that the mortality experience might be too different to adopt one country’s principles to other markets. In this article the postwar German mortality is related to main cause of death groups, showing a simular development in relation to what was observed in the US and other countries. Comparing actual population life tables of Western European countries unvails that today’s differences in the death probabilities are only minor. From this point of view selling German life insurance contracts in neighborning countries like Austria or Switzerland would not create an unacceptable risk.     

Politicians and Preferences of the Voter Majority: Does Gender Matter?

Does the gender of political representatives affect the extent to which they adhere to the voter majority's preferences? By matching individual male and female representatives' votes on legislative proposals with real referendum outcomes on the same issues, we obtain a direct measure of divergence. We find that female and male representatives adhere equally close to the majority's preferences if party affiliations are taken into account. This suggests that observed gender differences with respect to the national majority of voters may be reduced to an ideological left–right dimension.     

An evolutionary explanation of the value premium puzzle

As early as 1934 Graham and Dodd conjectured that excess returns from value investment originate from a tendency of stock prices to converge towards a fundamental value. This paper confirms their insights within the evolutionary finance model of Evstigneev et al. (Econ Theory 27:449–468, (Evstigneev et al. 2006)). Our empirical results show the predictive power of the evolutionary benchmark valuation for the relative market capitalization and its dynamics in the sample of firms listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index in 1981–2009.     

Does the presence of high-skilled employees increase total and high-skilled employment in the long run? Evidence from Austria

Studies conducted for the US have found a positive effect of human capital endowments on employment growth, with human capital endowments diverging at the same time. In contrast, studies for European countries have found convergence of human capital endowments. This paper tests these relationships for the 99 Austrian districts for the observation period 1971–2011 by estimating how the presence of high-skilled employment affects total, low-skilled and high-skilled employment growth. To this end, OLS, fixed-effects and first-difference regressions are estimated. The results indicate continuous convergence of high-skilled employment which, however, slowed down significantly since the 1990s. In contrast to previous studies, evidence for positive effects of high-skilled on total and low-skilled employment is only weak and varies over time. Furthermore, the results show that total and high-skilled employment in suburban areas grew faster than in other regions, while districts which bordered the Eastern Bloc were disadvantaged. Nevertheless, spatial neighbourhood effects within Austria are only weak.