An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

Joint-stock companies are among the most fundamental components of a market economy. “Voucher privatization” in the Czech Republic saw an abrupt mushrooming of joint-stock companies where none had appeared for over a generation. This occurred in an environment lacking in guiding...

The paper demonstrates how survey methods and retrospective questions can be put to effective use in the study of shadow-economy dynamics; specifically, the evolution of tax evasion in the Czech Republic. The authors measure the average individual's transition between the shadow and official...

Building upon exhaustive research of extant and often fragmentary contemporary resources, this paper provides a thorough analysis of financial options trading and sales in interwar Czechoslovakia. Whilst focusing primarily on a remarkable bucketshop episode occuring in the late twenties and...

A social rate of discount is an important variable for cost-benefit analysis. Its size can be crucial for an approval (or disapproval) of the project under evaluation, therefore it is important to have a theoretically founded estimate of the discount rate. There are two main approaches to...

The authors' approach to the ethical and political aspects of inter-temporal interactions is the following: 1) Two representative agents Ra and Râ are analyzed and asymmetries in their wealth and voting powers are dealt with by a the text-book tool of a welfare function - its intra and...

We examine a strategic-choice handicap model in which males send costly signals to advertise their quality to females. Females are concerned with the net viability of the male with whom they mate, where net viability is a function of the male's quality and signal. We identify circumstances in...

One of the key assumptions of neoclassical economics is the existence of the rational individual, who always tries to maximize his or her utility. The paper shows possibilities of experimental evaluation of this hypothesis with respect to the various groups of people who undertake the...

We present a model of learning in which agents learn from errors. If an action turns out to be an error, the agent rejects not only that action but also neighboring actions. We find that, keepng memory of his errors, under mild assumptions an acceptable solution is asymptotically reached....