Der Gebäudeversicherungsmarkt in Frankreich ist durch erhebliche Staatseingriffe geprägt. Die französische Regierung will offensichtlich, dass ein gewisser Versicherungsschutz (insbesondere gegen Naturkatastrophen) im ganzen Land zu gleichen Preisen angeboten wird. Sie ist bisher jedoch nicht...

We study the impact of home-biased public expenditure on international specialisation in general equilibrium models with increasing returns and monopolistic competition. It is found that home-biased procurement attracts increasing-returns industries to the home country (the "pull" effect) and...

We study, what Switzerland can learn from the disappearance of the property insurance monopolies in Germany. We show that the German insurance monopolies did not fight hard enough to defend their interests. a) Most of them knew that they would be bought up by another public insurance company....

We build a New Keynesian model of the business cycle with sticky prices and real wage rigidities motivated by efficiency wages of the gift exchange variety. Compared to a standard sticky price model, our Fair Wage model provides an explanation for structural employment and generates more...

The missing wage rigidity in general equilibrium models of effciency wages is an artifact of the external wage reference perspective conventionally adopted by the literature. Effciency wage models based on an internal perspective, in which the wage reference is made dependent on the firm's...

This paper attempts to measure the reaction of monetary policy to the stock market. We apply the procedure of Rigobon and Sack (2003) to identify and estimate a VAR in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This procedure fully takes into account the endogeneity of interest rates and stock returns...

Using a laboratory experiment we investigate how skew inuences choices under risk. We find that subjects make significantly riskier choices when the distribution of payoffs is positively skewed, these choices being driven in part by the shape of the utility function but also by subjective...

We investigate the impact of within-country spatial concentration of economic activity on country-level growth, using cross-section OLS and dynamic panel GMM estimation. Agglomeration is measured alternatively through measures of urbanization and through indices of spatial concentration based on...