Drei große Reformenpakete und eine Reihe kleinerer Begleitmaßnahmen prägen das renten¬politische Erbe der rot-grünen Bundesregierung. Einerseits greifen sie Trends in der Reformpolitik seit Beginn der 90er Jahre auf. So verstärkt die Rentenstrukturreform 2001 beispielsweise die...

Point allocation experiments are widely used in the social sciences. In these experiments, survey respondents distribute a fixed total number of points across a fixed number of alternatives. This paper reviews the different perspectives in the literature about what respondents do when they...

We consider some asymptotic distribution theory for M-estimators of the parameters of a linear model whose errors are non-negative; these estimators are the solutions of constrained optimization problems and their asymptotic theory is non-standard. Under weak conditions on the distribution of the...

Since the beginnings of modern economics, economists sought to emulate the revolution in physics initiated by Newton's 'Principia' (1687). Concepts from mechanics have influenced economic models both in terms of methodology and content. The aim of this theoretical paper is to put forward a novel...

Estimating structural models is often viewed as computationally difficult, an impression partly due to a focus on the nested fixed-point (NFXP) approach. We propose a new constrained optimization approach for structural estimation. We show that our approach and the NFXP algorithm solve the same...

Professional economists rarely write on questions of genocide. This surprises because a workhorse tool of the economics discipline concerns the analysis of behavior that takes place under constraints. All parties in genocide—perpetrators, victims, and third parties—face cost and resource...

In this working paper we go on with the study of a mapping in Rn associated to a quadratic optimization problem with one equality linear constraint. After showing some general properties related to homogeneity and the inverse mapping, we present some results regarding how the mapping behaves...

This paper presents a method capable of estimating richly parametrized versions of the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model that go beyond the standard scalar case. The algorithm is based on the maximization of a Gaussian quasi-likelihood using a Bregman-proximal trust-region method to...

The paper identifies a necessary and sufficient condition for a deterministic local optimum to be locally improved upon by a stochastic deviation. When this condition is satisfied, a method to construct the stochastic allocations that increase the objective is provided. This technique is applied...

The paper identifies a necessary and sufficient condition for a deterministic local optimum to be locally improved upon by a stochastic deviation. When this condition is satisfied, a method to construct the stochastic allocations that increase the objective is provided. This technique is applied...