This study presents a novel view on education and health behavior of individuals constrained by aging bodies. The aging process, i.e. the accumulation of health deficits over time, is built on recent insights from gerontology. The loss of body functionality, which eventually leads to death, can...

This paper proposes a theory for the social evolution of obesity. It considers a society, in which individuals experience utility from consumption of food and non-food, the state of their health, and the evaluation of their appearance by others. The theory explains why, ceteris paribus, poor...

The village funds programme in Thailand is one of the biggest microfinance programmes in the world aiming at improving access to finance and income in rural areas. Earlier studies indicate that the programme is successful in realising its ambitions to some degree. We extend this work by...

Linearity testing against smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) models when deterministic trends are potentially present in the data is considered in this paper. As opposed to recently reported results in Zhang (2012), we show that linearity tests against STAR models lead to useful results in...

This paper uses unique German data to examine the effects of the relative standing on the individual propensity to become self-employed in the next two years. The results suggest that the relationship between relative wage positions and propensity to become self-employed is U-shaped. This is...

Research can be carried out in academia, or in the private sector, or as a mixture, for example as privately funded academic research. We develop a theoretical framework in which private research funding (PRF) transfers information about the value of a research project from the private sector...

This paper shows that dynamic inefficiency can occur in dynamic general equilibrium models with fully optimizing, infinitely-lived households even in a situation with underinvestment. We identify necessary conditions for such a pos- sibility and illustrate it in a standard R\&D-based growth...

In this paper we establish a full information maximum likelihood approach to estimating the sample selection model with endogenous covariates. We also provide a test for exogeneity which indicates whether endogeneity is in fact a matter or not. In contrast to other methods proposed in the...

We investigate to what extent convergence in production levels per worker has been achieved in Germany since unification. To this end, we model the distribution of GDP per employee across German districts using two-component normal mixtures. While in the first year after unification, the two...

CEO compensation that is perceived to be excessive regularly causes agitation in the population. Using German data, we show that perceiving CEO pay to be unjust has economic repercussions in terms of lower work morale.