This paper shows how revealed preference relations, observed under general budget sets, can be extended using closure operators which impose certain assumptions on preferences. Common extensions are based on the assumption that preferences are convex and/or monotonic, but we also consider...

It is shown how to test revealed preference data on choices under uncertainty for consistency with first and second order stochastic dominance (FSD or SSD). The axiom derived for SSD is a necessary and sufficient condition for risk aversion. If an investor is risk averse, stochastic dominance...

We quantify differences in the retirement age between manual and non-manual workers and evaluate these differences in the context of the literature on equality of opportunity. The focus is on the question how individual background during childhood transmits through physical demands of...

This article provides a robust non-parametric approach to demand analysis based on a concept called homothetic efficiency. Homotheticity is a useful restriction or assumption but data rarely satisfy testable conditions. To overcome this problem, this article provides a way to estimate homothetic...

In this paper, we evaluate the success of publicly supported business start-ups by comparing the outcomes of various support measures. Our question is: do business starter get what they need? Since we do not know the needs of the founders we analyse (1) who received which kind of support...

This paper addresses the question of whether the effect of parental drinking on children’s later consumption of alcohol – which is frequently found to be of positive sign – exhibits a certain pattern of heterogeneity. In particular, if this eff ect is more prominent in the upper tail than...

This paper investigates the method of matching regarding two crucial implementation choices, the distance measure and the type of algorithm.We implement optimal full matching – a fully efficient algorithm – and present a framework for statistical inference. The implementation uses data from...

This work consists of two parts: First, it is shown that for a two-dimensional commodity space any homothetic utility function that rationalizes each pair of observations in a set of consumption data also rationalizes the entire set of observations. The result is stated as a pairwise version of...

This paper measures energy efficiency improvements of US single-family homes between 1997 and 2001 using a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, an indicator of energy efficiency is derived by means of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA),and the analogy between theDEAestimator and traditional...

We provide a framework to decompose preferences into a notion of distributive justice and a selfishness part and to recover individual notions of distributive justice from data collected in appropriately designed experiments. “Dictator games” with varying transfer rates used in Andreoni and...