Die Anonymisierung von sensiblen Individualdaten führt zu einem Konflikt zwischen dem Ziel der Minimierung des Reidentifikationsrisikos und der Qualität ökonometrischer Schätzungen. Der durch Anonymisierung bedingte Verlust an Effizienz und/oder der Konsistenz eines Schätzers wirft die...

Gemäß der klassischen ökonomischen Theorie der Kriminalität sollte ein Anstieg der erwarteten Strafe (also des Produktes aus Strafwahrscheinlichkeit und Strafmaß) eine Reduktion der Kriminalität bewirken. In der empirischen Analyse gestaltet sich ein Test dieser überschaubar anmutenden...

This paper outlines the regulatory framework within which occupational defined benefit pension plans are financed and addresses the challenges facing the funding of such plans. The Appendices include a summary and discussion of the funding regulations in twelve OECD countries plus Brazil – all...

The present paper reviews key issues in pension design and pension reform encountered all across the world. The paper heavily refers to the recent U.S. Social Security reform debate in general and to the Personal Retirement Accounts proposal in particular. A particular emphasis is put on...

We analyze the growth of family farms in Israeli cooperative villages between 1981 and 1995, using longitudinal data. We use instrumental variables to account for the endogeneity of initial farm size, and correct for selectivity due to farm survival. We also include a technical efficiency index,...

Interest in prediction markets has increased in the last decade, driven in part by the hope that these markets will prove to be valuable tools in forecasting, decision-making and risk management - in both the public and private sectors. This paper outlines five open questions in the literature,...

The economics literature provides ample evidence that higher corruption discourages FDI inflows. In this paper we address, for the first time in the literature in a systematic way, the exact reverse link, i.e., the empirical effect of FDI inflows on corruption. We present a simple model that...

Highly non-elliptical posterior distributions may occur in several econometric models, in particular, when the likelihood information is allowed to dominate and data information is weak. We explain the issue of highly non-elliptical posteriors in a model for the effect of education on income...

This paper is concerned with inference about a function g that is identified by a conditional moment restriction involving instrumental variables. The function is nonparametric. It satisfies mild regularity conditions but is otherwise unknown. The paper presents test of the hypothesis that g is...