We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in...

Public reputation mechanisms are an effective means to limit opportunistic behavior in markets suffering from moral hazard problems. While previous research was mostly concerned with the influence of exogenous feedback mechanisms, this study considers the endogenous emergence of reputation...

The Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) used by the Council of the European Union developed to a high degree of complexity from one modifying treaty to another, until the latest definition stipulated in the Treaty of Lisbon. This paper analyses this EU intra-institutional voting method using a...

In recent years, we have witnessed the effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the labour market. Technological changes, internet use, and robotics are changing the practices, services, and needs of organizations and employees in the labour market. These changes represent both a threat...

Behavioral economics aspires to replace the agents of neoclassical economics with living, breathing human beings. Here, the author argues that behavioral economics, like its neoclassical counterpart, often neglects the role of active sense-making that motivates and guides much human behavior....

Dramatic food price spikes in recent years have stimulated debate on the welfare implications of food price risk. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the number of undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa rose to a record 265 million in 2009. There is a...

High levels of economic inequality may lead to lower economic growth and can have negative social and political impacts. Recent empirical research shows that income and wealth inequalities in Eastern Europe since the fall of socialism increased significantly more than previously suggested....

The distribution of labour productivity is investigated by analyzing the longitudinal micro-level data set which contains the detailed financial conditions of large numbers of Japanese companies over the period 1996-2006. The authors show that the distribution of labour productivity in both the...

The authors propose a new method for estimating the power-law exponents of firm size variables. Their focus is on how to empirically identify a range in which a firm size variable follows a power-law distribution. On the one hand, as is well known a firm size variable follows a power-law...

In this paper, a new heavy-tailed distribution is used to model data with a strong right tail, as often occurs in practical situations. The distribution proposed is derived from the lognormal distribution, by using the Marshall and Olkin procedure. Some basic properties of this new distribution...