We provide the first estimates of the impact of managers' risk preferences on their training allocation decisions. Our conceptual framework links managers' risk preferences to firms' training decisions through the bonuses they expect to receive. Risk-averse managers are expected to select...

The authors compare a firm's costs and benefits of providing apprenticeship training in Austria and Switzerland, using two original micro data sets. While both countries share a number of similarities, including an extensive vocational education and training (VET) system, and a common border,...

Governments often aim to influence the amount and sectoral allocation of private investments through explicit or implicit subsidies. The rules used to select projects to benefit from subsidies may vary, depending on the policy objective. This paper develops a general framework to allocate...

This paper examines the economic foundations of three criteria used for evaluating the costs and benefits of social programs. Some criteria do not consider the scale of programs or address the costs associated with programs that expand or contract the total government budget. A recent addition...

Following early economist Francis Y. Edgeworth's proposal to measure people's hedonic experiences as they go about their daily lives, we use a smartphone app that over eight years randomly asked a panel of 30, 936 UK residents (N = 2, 235, 733) about their momentary feelings and activities to...

Lenders condition future loans on some index of past performance. Typically, banks condition future loans on repayments of earlier obligations whilst international organizations (official lenders) condition future loans on the implementation of some policy action (‘investment’). We build an...