The use of payment cards, either debit or credit, is becoming more and more widespread in developed economies. Nevertheless, the use of cash remains significant. We hypothesize that the lack of card acceptance at the point of sale is a key reason why cash continues to play an important role. We...

This paper analyses two aspects of environmental regulations triggered by ecoinnovations. First, whether there are long term effects of regulation on innovation. Second, whether the impact of different types of regulation differ by type of the environmental benefit of the innovations. To answer...

Processes of social opinion formation might be dominated by a set of highly influential agents acting as 'opinion leaders'. Here we explore whether such a perspective could shed light on the dynamics of a well known economic sentiment index. To this end, we hypothesize that the respondents of...

This paper uses newly available data to describe the distribution of crime victimization and other criminal activities (including drug trafficking and corruption) around the world. The paper then documents a negative (positive) correlation between measures of criminal activity and happiness and...

The use of payment cards, either debit or credit, is becoming more and more widespread in developed economies. Nevertheless, the use of cash remains significant. We hypothesize that the lack of card acceptance at the point of sale is a key reason why cash continues to play an important role. We...

Unlike most of the earlier U.S. time-use surveys, the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) does not collect information on secondary activities. It does, however, include a set of questions asking respondents to identify times when a child under 13 was "in your care." The goal of these questions is...

We repeatedly elicit beliefs about the returns to study effort in a panel survey of students of a large university course. A behavioral model of quasi-hyperbolic discounting and malleable beliefs yields the prediction that the dynamics of return beliefs mirrors the importance of exerting...

More than 25 years after German reunification, key economic indicators for households living in eastern German regions are still below the western German levels. This particularly holds for private net wealth, which reaches only about 40% of the western German level. However, a more granular...

A key parameter in international economics is the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods, also called the Armington elasticity. Yet estimates vary widely. We collect 3,524 reported estimates of the elasticity, construct 34 variables that reflect the context in which...

We propose in this paper a dynamic n-state transition model to correct for measurement error, that could arise for example from recall and/or design bias, in retrospective panels. Our model allows the correction of measurement errors, when very little auxiliary information is available, over a...