Individuals frequently transfer commodities without an explicit contract or an implicit enforcement mechanism. We design an experiment to study whether such commodity transfers can be viewed as investments based on trust and reciprocity, or whether they rather resemble presents with...

To assess the predictive content of the interest rate term spread for future economic growth, we distinguish short-run from long-run predictability by using two different approaches. First, following Dufour and Renault (1998) a test procedure is proposed to test for causality at different...

We consider problems in modelling job-matching in the Czech Republic during the transition to a market economy. Special interest is devoted to functional form considerations and the analysis of returns to scale of the matching function. This explorative study aims to shed some light into the...

The utility maximization problem of "ratchet investors" who do not tolerate any decline in their consumption rate is solved explicitly for all felicity functions in a Markovian framework which includes Brownian motion and Poisson processes as special cases. The optimal consumption plan turns out...

Experimental studies have shown that trust and reciprocity are effective in increasing efficiency when complete contracting is infeasible. One example is the study by Berg et al. (1995) of the investment game. In this game the person who receives the investment is the one who may reward the...

In a complete financial market every contingent claim can be hedged perfectly. In an incomplete market it is possible to stay on the safe side by superhedging. But such strategies may require a large amount of initial capital. Here we study the question what an investor can do who is unwilling...