According to the expectations channel, a fiscal consolidation may give rise to less contractionary, or even expansionary effects on consumption, despite a decline in current disposable income. Intuitively, people may accumulate a stock of savings in anticipation of the consolidation and may...

Empirical work on Akerlof’s theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

Models with structured additive predictor provide a very broad and rich framework for complex regression modeling. They can deal simultaneously with nonlinear covariate effects and time trends, unit- or cluster-specific heterogeneity, spatial heterogeneity and complex interactions between...

Team success relies on assigning team members to the right tasks. We use controlled experiments to study how roles are assigned within teams and how this affects team performance. Subjects play the takeover game in pairs consisting of a buyer and a seller. Understanding optimal play is very...

This paper studies the vulnerability of the pivotal mechanism with respect to manipulation by groups. In a lab experiment, groups decide on the implementation of various alternatives, some of which imply opposite interests for the two subgroups. We investigate the occurrence of tacit and...

Trade-related measures aim to regulate side-effects in international environmental agreements and are expected to positively influence the level of participation in the agreements as well as their degree of stability. In this paper we examine one side-effect of the 1994 International Tropical...

Empirical research often requires a method how to convert a deterministic economic theory into an econometric model. A popular method is to add a random error term on the utility scale. This method, however, violates stochastic dominance. A modification of this method is proposed to avoid...

Near real-time monitoring of ecosystem disturbances is critical for addressing impacts on carbon dynamics, biodiversity, and socio-ecological processes. Satellite remote sensing enables cost-effective and accurate monitoring at frequent time steps over large areas. Yet, generic methods to detect...

This paper picks up on a model developed by Philipov and Glickman (2006) for modeling multivariate stochastic volatility via Wishart processes. MCMC simulation from the posterior distribution is employed to fit the model. However, erroneous mathematical transformations in the full conditionals...

Commonly used classification and regression tree methods like the CART algorithm are recursive partitioning methods that build the model in a forward stepwise search. Although this approach is known to be an efficient heuristic, the results of recursive tree methods are only locally optimal, as...