Using Allensbach survey data about how people look forward to the coming year, we construct true ex post-forecasts and compare them with the forecasts produced by the German Council of Economic Experts and by the Economic Research Institutes. Then, we perform rationality tests for these forecast...

We look at the relation between democracy and perceived subjective well-being, taking also into account the impact of income and culture. After briefly reviewing the empirical results for Switzerland, we re-estimate this relationship allowing for the relative income position of individuals and...

This paper approaches the causal analysis of sequences of interventions from a potential outcome perspective. The identifying power of several different assumptions concerning the connection between the dynamic selection process and the outcomes of different sequences is discussed. The...

This paper uses a sample of 71 countries in a cross-country context to empirically analyze the relationship between income distribution and software piracy rates. It measures income inequality by the Gini coefficient and alternatively by quintile shares. This analysis remedies previous...

Early retirement is predominantly considered to be the result of incentives set by social security and the tax system. But the Swiss example demonstrates that the incidence of early retirement has dramatically increased even in the absence of institutional changes. We argue that an actuarially...

In this paper I analyze firm training in the dynamic context of a Blanchard-model with infinite periods. Firms provide their workers with training due to wage compression caused by frictions in the labor market. I do not only describe the stationary solution but as well the transition to...

This paper discusses the estimation of binary choice panel data models. We begin with different versions of the static random effects model when the explanatory variables are strictly exogenous. Depending on the autocorrelation structure of the errors, different estimators are available and we...

In this paper we consider an incomplete market framework and explain how to use jointly observed prices of the underlying asset and of some deriv- atives written on this asset for an efficient pricing of other derivatives. This question involves two types of moment restrictions, which can be...

The paper addresses the issue of potentially endogenous control variables in evaluation studies based on the assumption that selection bias can be avoided by conditioning on observed variables. It shows that the standard formulation of the conditional independence (CIA) or selection on...

We analyse the effects of government sponsored training for the unemployed conducted during East German transition. For the microeconometric analysis, we use a new, large and informative administrative database that allows us to use matching methods to reduce potential selection bias, to study...