Many public goods like dams, fire departments, and lighthouses do not provide direct utility but act more as insurance devices against floods, fire, and shipwreck. They either diminish the probability or the size of the loss. We extend the public good model with this insurance aspect and...

Recently, early investments in the human capital of children from socially disadvantaged environments have attracted a great deal of attention. In a discrete version of the Mirrlees model with a parents' and a children's generation we show the intra-generational and the inter-generational...

According to a widely held belief, ?all who are able to work, should work?. We consider this statement within a framework of non-linear taxation. The crucial difference between our model and the standard model is that the government can distinguish between productive persons and the disabled. A...

When the centre-left government came into power in Germany in 1998, a core promise of the new Chancellor, Schroeder, was to reduce the lack of jobs and to increase welfare. Facing persistently increasing unemployment rates from then on, the government finally launched ?Hartz IV? in 2004; the largest...

One possible conclusion from recent experimental research on decision making under risk is that observed behaviour can be reasonable accommodated by expected utility plus an error term. This conclusion implies that the violation rate of expected utility should decrease if errors are excluded....

Empirical research has shown that inexperienced fund managers yield significantly higher returns than their more experienced colleagues. If the portfolios of inexperienced are not more risky, this result would contradict the hypothesis of market efficiency. Therefore, it is an important question...

This study provides evidence from a questionnaire survey of fund managers. We find that the majority of respondents rely on momentum, contrarian and buy-&-hold strategies to some degree. Although there were few applicants who exclusively rely on a single trading strategy, clear preferences...

Our questionnaire survey finds that most fund managers rely on the strategies of buy-&-hold, momentum and contrarian trading. These strategies are typically applied mutually. Their use is rooted in the attributes and beliefs of the respective fund managers: buy-&-hold traders behave...

Existing empirical evidence is inconclusive on whether professional investors show sophisticated behavior or not, a question which is at the heart of market efficiency. This ambiguous evidence is mostly based on trading data or laboratory evidence, which each has its limitations. We complement...

Experimental research on decision making under risk has until now always employed choice data in order to evaluate the empirical performance of expected utility and the alternative nonexpected utility theories. The present paper performs a similar analysis which relies on pricing data instead of...