Cross-border commuting and consuming: an empirical investigation

This article contributes to our understanding of cross-border activity in general and the determinants of cross-border trade in particular by focusing on the part of cross-border sales that arise due to work-related cross-border crossings of households. We analyse empirically how cross-border consumption expenditures vary across product and services categories as well as household characteristics using representative household survey data of cross-border commuters to Luxembourg. In total, these households spend an estimated 17% of their gross annual income across the border, contributing about 10% to the total household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) in Luxembourg. Cross-border expenditure is linked to individual- and household-related characteristics and to distance between home and work. Cross-border commuters systematically exploit arbitrage opportunities that arise because of existing price level (index) differences between the country of work and the country of residence.     

Entrepreneurs and the Process of Obtaining Resources

This paper examines the process of how entrepreneurs assemble resources. In the model, the entrepreneur's challenge is to convince two complementary resource providers to commit their resources to a new venture. Before committing their resources, one of them needs to perform a costly evaluation. The entrepreneur has a problem with getting sufficient attention, because each provider has an incentive to wait and free-ride on the other's evaluation. For some parameters the entrepreneur solicits both partners with equal intensity ("knocking on every door"); for others, the entrepreneur always solicits the same partner ("pestering"). For many but not all parameter ranges, the process of assembling resources takes too much time relative to what is socially efficient. The model thus explores what factors facilitate or hinder the creation of new firms.     

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.     

Group decision-making: Head-count versus intensity of preference

This paper puts forth a framework for reshaping the group decision-making process. The proposed framework extends from the usual one-issue-at-a-time decision-making to one that involves several related issues simultaneously. Weaknesses of the traditional majority voting mechanism are first identified, and then a different voting method that takes each individual voter's sentiment into account is discussed. Specifically, a decision-maker is asked to express his/her intensity of preference for the issues encountered. Three hierarchical structures—benefits, costs, and risks—are developed to evaluate the alternatives. Due to the nature of pairwise comparisons and synthesis, the proposed method is amenable to consensus building and has higher reliability and consistency. It can be used for candidate selection, e.g. governmental election, when a large population is involved. It is also effective for resource allocation and prioritization when a small group or business is concerned. We believe the proposed approach has potential for resolving deficiencies of the conventional voting mechanism, and can be applied to many real-world problems. Its implementation on the Internet is also discussed.     

The Impact of Labour Market Reforms and Economic Performance on the Matching of the Short‐term and the Long‐term Unemployed

As a reaction to high and persistent unemployment in Germany, the largest labour market reforms in post‐war history were implemented between 2003 and 2005. We analyse the impact of the reforms and its coincidence with an economic expansion on the efficiency of matching out of unemployment. Especially focussing on searcher heterogeneity, we estimate a system of stock‐flow matching functions for short‐term and long‐term unemployment (three‐stage least squares) on the basis of administrative data. In sum, the reforms increased matching efficiency for both groups, but the effect was larger for the long‐term unemployed. The interaction of reforms and economic expansion, however, was not influential.     

Learning to bid: The design of auctions under uncertainty and adaptation

We examine auction design in a context where symmetrically informed adaptive agents with common valuations learn to bid for a good. Despite the absence of private valuations, asymmetric information, or risk aversion, bidder strategies do not converge to the Bertrand–Nash equilibrium strategies even in the long run. Deviations from equilibrium strategies depend on uncertainty regarding the value of the good, auction structure, the agents? learning model, and the number of bidders. Although individual agents learn Nash bidding strategies in isolation, the learning of each agent, by flattening the best-reply correspondence of other agents, blocks common learning. These negative externalities are more severe in second-price auctions, auctions with many bidders, and auctions where the good has an uncertain value ex post.     

Does a marching band impact college Football game attendance? A panel study of Division II

Marching bands are an integral part of the college football game-day experience by increasing both the quantity and quality of entertainment. Academic music programs could enhance a band’s entertainment value via better-trained members and recruitment of more highly skilled musicians. The impact of these influences on game-day attendance is explored using data from nine years of regular season games in Division II. The regression model controls for economic factors, home-team performance, demographic influences and game characteristics and employs boot-strap clustering methods for calculating standard errors of coefficients. Results suggest that a marching band, the existence of an academic music program and being a historically black college each exerts an independent positive impact on attendance after controlling for all other factors.     

Investor Pessimism and the German Stock Market: Exploring Google Search Queries

We analyze the relationship of retail investor sentiment and the German stock market by introducing four distinct investor pessimism indices (IPIs) based on selected aggregate Google search queries. We assess the predictive power of weekly changes in sentiment captured by the IPIs for contemporaneous and future DAX returns, volatility and trading volume. The indices are found to have individually varying, but overall remarkably high explanatory power. An increase in retail investor pessimism is accompanied by decreasing contemporaneous market returns and an increase in volatility and trading volume. Future returns tend to increase while future volatility and trading volume decrease. The outcome is in line with the conjecture of correction effects. Overall, the results are well in line with modern investor sentiment theory.     

Bottom‐up world climate policies: Preserving fossil fuel deposits vs. capping fuel consumption

The policy of purchasing fossil fuel deposits for preservation is an alternative to the demand‐side climate policies that predominate in practice and in professional studies. This paper analyzes the deposit purchase approach and compares it to the standard demand‐side policy in a model with international trade and non‐cooperative governments that account for the effects of their policies on equilibrium prices. We investigate how the two regimes differ with respect to their equilibrium allocations and, in particular, with respect to the countries’ mitigation effort and welfare. If countries are symmetric, mitigation is stronger in the demand‐side than in the supply‐side regime and the transition from the latter to the former is welfare enhancing for all countries. If countries have different endowments of deposits in a two‐country economy, the country with higher extraction costs does not purchase deposits for preservation, and the country with lower extraction costs is better off with the supply‐side than with the demand‐side policy. Finally, we consider the case of combined policies and find surprisingly that no equilibrium in pure strategies exists, when heterogeneous countries apply both policy instruments.     

Measuring lnequality in the Middle East 1990–2016: The World’s Most Unequal Region?

In this paper we combine household surveys, national accounts, income tax data and wealth data in order to estimate income concentration in the Middle East for the period 1990–2016. According to our benchmark series, the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world, with a top decile income share as large as 64 percent, compared to 37 percent in Western Europe, 47 percent in the US and 55 percent in Brazil (see Alvaredo et al. 2018). This is due both to enormous inequality between countries (particularly between oil‐rich and population‐rich countries) and to large inequality within countries (which we probably under‐estimate, given the limited access to proper fiscal data). We stress the importance of increasing transparency on income and wealth in the Middle East, as well as the need to develop mechanisms of regional redistribution and investment.