Tax and social reforms aiming at lowering the tax burden and cutting social benefits may boost effciency and output, and improve market adjustment to shocks. But they may also reduce the impact of automatic stabilizers and so cause a less cyclical smoothing. This is problematic in the Economic...

Several empirical studies are concerned with measuring the effect of currency and current account crises on economic growth. Using different empirical models this paper serves two aspects. It provides an explicit assessment of country specific factors influencing the costs of crises in terms of...

In the framework of small-scale agent-based financial market models, the paper starts out from the concept of structural stochastic volatility, which derives from different noise levels in the demand of fundamentalists and chartists and the time-varying market shares of the two groups. It...

We develop a novel financial market model in which the stock markets of two countries are linked via and with the foreign exchange market. To be precise, there are domestic and foreign speculators in each of the two stock markets which rely either on linear technical or linear fundamental...

The phenomenon of manipulation of the economy by the incumbent for electoral purpose is called Political Business Cycles (PBC). Using policy control economic instruments, such as fiscal and monetary instruments, governments may manipulate the economy to gain electoral advantage by producing...

A growing body of literature reports evidence of social interaction effects in survey expectations. In this note, we argue that evidence in favor of social interaction effects should be treated with caution, or could even be spurious. Utilizing a parsimonious stochastic model of expectation...

This article explores the influence of competitive conditions on the evolutionary fitness of different risk preferences. As a practical example, the professional competition between fund managers is considered. To explore how different settings of competition parameters, the exclusion rate and...

If information asymmetries prevent talented students of non-academic backgrounds from applying for merit-based aid, the full potential of qualified youth will not be unfolded and social selectivity is likely to corroborate. This paper analyzes whether information asymmetries exist and decrease...

Within the seminal cobweb model of Brock and Hommes, firms adapt their price expectations by a profit-based switching behavior between free näive expectations and costly rational expectations. Brock and Hommes demonstrate that fixed-point dynamics may turn into increasingly complex dynamics as...

Starting in 2004/2005, the German state Baden-Wurttemberg reduced academic track duration from nine to eight years, leaving cumulative instruction time mostly unchanged. I use this change in schooling policy to identify the effect of schooling intensity on student well-being in life and school,...