This article investigates economic performance when enforceable property rights are missing and basic needs matter for consumption. It suggests a new view of the so-called voracity effect according to which windfall gains in productivity induce behavior that leads to lower economic growth....

Iannaccone's (1991) seminal paper assigns basic market principles to the market for religion. In a competitive market with high religious diversity the level of overall religiosity should increase. The Secularization Hypothesis suggests that the establishment of new churches casts doubt on the...

While it is widely agreed that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) holds as a long-run concept the specific dynamic driving the process is largely build upon a priori economic belief rather than a thorough statistical modeling procedure. The two prevailing time series models, i.e. the exponential...

This study validates a survey-based measure of general risk attitude by an incentive compatible experiment among more than 900 participants in rural Thailand. The survey measure of self-assessed risk attitude provides a useful approximation of the experimentally derived risk attitude. This holds...

Economic experiments have only gained limited attention as research methods within the range of agricultural policy analysis. The aim of this paper is to reconsider basics of economic experiments and to compare them to other research methods. Finally, we will demonstrate one potential...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...

We present a stochastic version of the single-level, multi-product dynamic lotsizing problem subject to a capacity constraint. A production schedule has to be determined for random demand so that expected costs are minimized and a constraint based on a new backlog-oriented $\delta$-service-level...

The output multiplier turns negative before a deficit spending program expires. We show the generality of this unpleasant finding for the standard real business cycle model. We then calibrate an extended model for the US and demonstrate how fiscal stimulus slows down economic recovery from...

A "lost decade" for the Eurozone is looming on the horizon. Under these circumstances, stable indicators for future economic activity are especially valuable to decision makers. This paper examines the predictive power of the yield spread, one of the most reliable indicators for gross domestic...

Monetary policy is superneutral in an overlapping generations model. Previous authors have argued that superneutrality does not hold in such a setting. However, the standard results rely on the counter-factual premise of helicopter money and are overturned if money creation through open market...