The Spanish economy is currently plagued by a deep recession with very high unemployment. We ask how much of the unemployment increase in Spain can be traced back to the debt deleveraging needs of Spanish households. We use provincial household debt and sectoral unemployment data and follow Mian...

Das Finanzierungssaldo des Landes Berlin ist bereits seit elf Jahren durchgehend negativ. Um die Finanzierungsprobleme zu lösen, hat der Berliner Senat kürzlich einen Finanzplan mit erheblichen Einsparungen bis zum Jahr 2009 vorgelegt. Reichen diese Maßnahmen aus, die Haushaltslage zu...

This study presents results of the validation of an ultra-short survey measure of patience included in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Survey responses predict intertemporal choice behavior in incentive-compatible decisions in a representative sample of the German adult population.

Lifelong learning is often promoted in aging societies, but little is known about its returns or governments’ ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average...

Alemania tiene una amplia experiencia en subsidios que afectan el empleo, como los que discute actualmente en Chile el Consejo Asesor Presidencial de Trabajo y Equidad. Existe, entonces, la oportunidad de apreciar cuáles iniciativas han dado resultado y cuáles no. En estas páginas se sostiene...

This paper evaluates the performance of simple policy rules in an open economy. By introducing a high degree of exchange rate uncertainty we find that policy rules with an important feedback from movements in the real exchange rate are very robust to uncertainty about the true exchange rate...

The general-equilibrium effects of performance-related teacher pay include long-term incentive and teacher-sorting mechanisms that usually elude experimental studies but are captured in cross-country comparisons. Combining country-level performance-pay measures with rich PISA-2003 international...

It is often argued that multinationals are reluctant to transfer technology due to the fear of spillovers. We show that this need not be the case if host country policies like taxation are taken into account. Furthermore, we examine the incentives the multinational and the host country have to...

The extant theory on price discrimination in input markets takes the structure of the downstream industry as exogenously given. This paper endogenizes the structure of the downstream industry and examines the effects of permitting third-degree price discrimination on market structure and...