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,...

Team success relies on assigning team members to the right tasks. We use controlled experiments to study how roles are assigned within teams and how this affects team performance. Subjects play the takeover game in pairs consisting of a buyer and a seller. Understanding optimal play is very...

Trade-related measures aim to regulate side-effects in international environmental agreements and are expected to positively influence the level of participation in the agreements as well as their degree of stability. In this paper we examine one side-effect of the 1994 International Tropical...

Empirical research often requires a method how to convert a deterministic economic theory into an econometric model. A popular method is to add a random error term on the utility scale. This method, however, violates stochastic dominance. A modification of this method is proposed to avoid...

Near real-time monitoring of ecosystem disturbances is critical for addressing impacts on carbon dynamics, biodiversity, and socio-ecological processes. Satellite remote sensing enables cost-effective and accurate monitoring at frequent time steps over large areas. Yet, generic methods to detect...

This paper picks up on a model developed by Philipov and Glickman (2006) for modeling multivariate stochastic volatility via Wishart processes. MCMC simulation from the posterior distribution is employed to fit the model. However, erroneous mathematical transformations in the full conditionals...

Commonly used classification and regression tree methods like the CART algorithm are recursive partitioning methods that build the model in a forward stepwise search. Although this approach is known to be an efficient heuristic, the results of recursive tree methods are only locally optimal, as...

Measurement invariance is an important assumption in the Rasch model and mixture models constitute a flexible way of checking for a violation of this assumption by detecting unobserved heterogeneity in item response data. Here, a general class of Rasch mixture models is established and...

We argue that current sovereign debt management lacks important incentives for governments and politicians to fulfill it in a sustainable and long-term orientated way. This paper outlines that the mechanisms to solve sovereign debt problems within the EMU are not only missing the right...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of institutions and institutional choice on truth-telling and trust in sender-receiver games. We find that in an institution with sanctioning opportunities, receivers sanction predominantly after having trusted lies. Individuals who...