Cross-sectional earnings risk and occupational sorting: The role of risk attitudes

This paper investigates to what extent individuals' risk preferences are correlated with the cross-sectional earnings risk of their occupation. We exploit data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which contains a direct survey question about willingness to take risks that has been shown to be a behaviorally valid measure of risk aversion. As a measure of earnings risk, we use the cross-sectional variation in earnings that is left unexplained by human capital variables in Mincerian wage regressions. Our evidence shows that individuals with low willingness to take risks are more likely to work in occupations with low earnings risk. This pattern is found regardless of the level of occupation categories, region, gender and labor market experience.     

Neuer Nachholfaktor der Rentenversicherung im Geflecht von Schutz- und Niveauschutzklausel

Wirtschaftsdienst - Im Zuge der Einführung der Niveauschutzklausel in der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung hat man den Nachholfaktor außer Kraft gesetzt. Um diese unbefriedigende Situation...     

Organizational Design,Competition, and Financial Exchanges

We investigate the incentives for vertical and horizontal integration in the financial securities service industry. In a model with two exchanges and two central securities depositories (CSDs), we find that decentralized decisions might lead to privately and socially inferior industry equilibria with vertical integration of both CSDs with their respective exchanges. Allowing for horizontal integration of CSDs avoids privately inferior industry equilibria. However, we observe too little horizontal integration from the social perspective. We link our results to recent regulatory and institutional developments such as the emergence of multilateral trading facilities, over-the-counter regulation, and financial harmonization.     

Alternative evolutionary theories: A historical survey

Our overview has the objective of making our study relevant to bioeconomists. The need for the ‘alternatives’ to the Synthetic Theory of Evolution in social-economic studies was substantiated, for example, by Colombatto (Journal of Bioeconomics, 5, 1–25, 2003), who maintains that the natural-selection theory is ‘ill suited’ to describing evolutionary processes in economics. He proposed an alternative ‘non-Darwinian’ approach by equating the ‘non-Darwinian’ approach with a definite version of neo-Lamarckism. Yet, as we will show, there is a palette of alternative approaches within and beyond the neo-Lamarckism. We hope to give bioeconomists more choice in their theoretical modeling and constructing of analogies between biology and economics. It will also be shown that in the light of suggested definitions the concept of ‘universal Darwinism’ recently discussed in bioeconomics makes little sense as a generalizing category. In addition, in the concluding part of the paper we demonstrate that the majority of alternative approaches are far from being pigeonholed as archaic and once and for all wiped off the theoretical landscape. On the contrary, in recent years one can observe some revival of interest in the theoretical ‘heresies’.      

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Job and vacancy competition in empirical matching functions

We investigate job competition among job seekers and vacancy competition among firms extending the job competition model proposed by Anderson and Burgess (Anderson, P.M., Burgess, S.M., 2000. Empirical matching functions: Estimation and interpretation using state level data. Review of Economics and Statistics 82, p. 90–102). Our results for data from West Germany provide evidence for both phenomena, thereby extending and qualifying previous insights.     

Reasons for Japan's low unemployment rate

Since the beginning of the seventies, most OECD member countries have suffered from a substantial increase in measured unemployment rates. A notable exception is Japan, whose official unemployment rate is far below observed figures in other countries. This article examines the reasons why Japan's unemployment record has been better than those of the USA and West Germany.