Empirical work on Akerlof’s theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

We develop a model relating self-control, risk preferences and conflict identification to cooperation patterns in social dilemmas. We subject our model to data from an experimental public goods game and a risk experiment, and we measure conflict identification and self-control. As predicted, we...

The aim of this paper is to develop a model-based seasonal adjustment method which will yield the same decomposition formulas as the descriptive seasonal adjustment procedures proposed in Schlicht/Pauly (1984) and Schlicht (1981). Hence the duality between the descriptive and the model-based...

The seasonal adjustment method proposed by Schlicht (1981) can be viewed as a method that minimizes non-stochastic deviations (perturbations). This interpretation gives rise to a critique of the seasonality criterion used there. A new seasonality criterion is proposed that avoids these...

In this paper we focus on the compliance effects of tax regime changes. According to the economic model of tax evasion, a tax reform should affect compliance through its impact on tax rates and incentives. Our findings demonstrate the importance of at least two further effects not covered by the...

Auctions often involve goods exhibiting a common knowledge ex-post risk that is independent of buyers’ private values or their signals regarding common value components. Esö and White (2004) showed theoretically that ex-post risk leads to precautionary bidding for DARA bidders: Agents reduce...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. A practical problem arises, however, when some data points are missing. This note proposes a method for coping with this problem.

This note gives a fairly complete statistical description of the Hodrick-Prescott Filter (1997), originally proposed by Leser (1961). It builds on an approach to seasonal adjustment suggested by Leser (1963) and Schlicht (1981, 1984). A moments estimator for the smoothing parameter is proposed...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. A practical problem arises, however, when the time series contains structural breaks (such as produced by German unification for German time series, for...

Crime has to be punished, but does punishment reduce crime? We conduct a neutrally framed laboratory experiment to test the deterrence hypothesis, namely that crime is weakly decreasing in deterrent incentives, i.e. severity and probability of punishment. In our experiment, subjects can steal...