Sick-pay is a common provision in labor contracts. It insures workers against a sudden loss of income due to unexpected absences and helps them smooth consumption. Therefore, many governments find sick-pay socially desirable and choose to mandate its provision. But sick-pay is not without its...

It is well known that the rock-paper-scissors game has no pure saddle point. We show that this holds more generally: A symmetric two-player zero-sum game has a pure saddle point if and only if it is not a generalized rock-paper-scissors game. Moreover, we show that every finite symmetric...

Individuals exhibit a randomization preference if they prefer random mixtures of two bets to each of the involved bets. Such preferences provide the foundation of various models of uncertainty aversion. However, it has to our knowledge not been empirically investigated whether uncertainty-averse...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...

This paper deals with the modeling of the relationship of European Union Allowance spot- and futures-prices within the second commitment period of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme. Based on high frequency data, we analyze causality in the first and the second conditional moments. To...

Sollen in Zukunft ambitionierte Ziele der nachhaltigen Flächennutzung erreicht werden, wie zum Beispiel das 30-Hektar-Ziel aus der Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie der rot-grünen Bundesregierung aus dem Jahre 2002, dann müssen politische Strategien gefunden werden, die es erlauben, weitgehende...

What is the motivational effect of imposing a minimum effort require- ment? Agents may no longer exert voluntary effort but merely meet the requirement. Here, we examine how such hidden costs of control change when control is considered legitimate. We study a principal- agent model where control...