Of the world’s 6.7 billion people (as of 2008), 1.3 billion lived on less than $1.25 Purchasing Power Parity dollars per person per day and another 1.7 billion lived on between $1.25 and $2.50 PPP dollars (Chen and Ravallion, 2012). The scourge of absolute economic misery among billions of the...

We study work effort with its various determinants such as the educational level of the worker, the minimum or start-up salary as well as the initial endowment of the worker. By means of optimization we find that optimal work effort depends directly on the initial income available to the worker,...

Chapter 1 is joint work with Günter Franke, University of Konstanz, and Markus Herrmann, HSBC London, and addresses the question how collateralized debt obligation (CDO-) transactions are designed. An important issue is the information asymmetry about the quality of securitized debt between...

In this paper we focus on education as a private decision to invest in ‘human capital’ and the estimation of the rate of return to that private investment. While the literature is replete with studies that estimate the rate of return using regression methods where the estimated return is...

Volkswirtschaftliche Modelle werden heute häufig als mikro-fundierte dynamische Optimierungsmodelle konstruiert. Dabei wird meist ein repräsentativer Agent mit rationalen Erwartungen betrachtet. Durch adaptive Lernalgorithmen können rationale Erwartungen als Ergebnis von optimierendem...