This research advances an evolutionary theory and provides empirical evidence that shed new light on the origins of contemporary differences in life expectancy across countries. The theory suggests that social, economic and environmental changes that were associated with the Neolithic Revolution...

Are the Neolithic revolution’s effects still impacting incomes across the world today? I find strong support for this proposition using new, country-specific estimates of the timing of agricultural transition. While support with my data is slightly weaker than with the coarser data of Hibbs...

This paper exploits cross-country variation in the degree of geographical isolation, prior to the advent of sea-faring and airborne transportation technologies, to examine its impact on the course of economic development across the globe. The empirical investigation establishes that prehistoric...

We draw on Ricardian comparative advantage between distinct persons to map out the division of labor among proto-humans in a village some 1.7 million years ago. A person specialized in maintaining a cooking fire in the village is of particular interest (Ofek [2001]). We are also interested in...

While risk selection within the German public health insurance system has received considerable attention, risk selection between public and private health insurers has largely been ignored. This is surprising since - given the institutional structure - risk selection between systems is likely...

This paper explores the relationship between risk attitude and asset diversification in household portfolios. We first examine the impact of manifested risk aversion on the total number of distinct assets held in a portfolio (naive diversification). The second part of the paper focuses on a more...

With banking sectors worldwide still suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, public discussion of plans to place toxic assets in one or more bad banks has gained steam in recent weeks. The following paper presents a plan how governments can efficiently relieve ailing banks from toxic...

This document provides an overview of the long-term care system, the number and develop-ment of beneficiaries and the long-term care policy in Germany. The report is part of the first stage of the European project ANCIEN (Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations), commissioned by the European...

Bei dem vorliegenden Pflegeheim Rating Report 2009 handelt es sich um den zweiten seit 2007. Hauptziel ist die Verbesserung der Transparenz im deutschen Pflegemarkt - mit Fokus auf der stationären Pflege. Daraus abgeleitet ergibt sich der Anspruch, den Entscheidungsträgern auf den...

Several approaches for subset recovery and improved forecasting accuracy have been proposed and studied. One way is to apply a regularization strategy and solve the model selection task as a continuous optimization problem. One of the most popular approaches in this research field is given by...