This chapter reviews recent research adopting methods from statistical physics in theoretical or empirical work in economics and nance. The bulk of what has recently become known as 'econophysics' in broader circles draws its motivation from observed scaling laws in nancial markets and the...

Based on the observation that industries are often geographically concentrated, this paper proposes a new political economy model of trade protection. We associate the sectors of a specific factors model with electoral districts populated by continua of heterogeneous voters who differ in their...

On the basis of abundant facility and firm-level data for German manufacturing, originating from a recent OECD-survey, this paper empirically investigates the relevance of a variety of incentives for environmentally innovative behavior of facilities, the respective influence of pressure groups,...

This note is concerned with two recent agent-based models of speculative dynamics from the literature, one by Gaunersdorfer and Hommes and the other by He and Li. At short as well as long lags, both of them display an autocorrelation structure in absolute and squared returns that comes...

In diesem Papier wollen wir zum einen kurz die Stärken und Schwächen der EU-Direktive aufzeigen. Zum anderen wollen wir einige offene Fragen diskutieren, die bei der Umsetzung des Emissionshandels auf nationaler Ebene – insbesondere bei der Aufstellung des nationalen Allokationsplans –...

Using an experiment with material incentives, this paper investigates the violation of composite dominance relationships, viz. absolute Pareto dominance, Pareto rank dominance, transfer dominance, Lorenz dominance, and generalized Lorenz dominance. Moreover, we test tail independence. The...

We study long-term incentives for polluting and regulated firms to invest in advanced abatement technologies, when some new technology is available but an even better technology will be expected in the future. Firms can invest only once. We find that depending on the adoption fixed costs all...

High-frequency financial data are characterized by a set of ubiquitous statistical properties that prevail with surprising uniformity. While these 'stylized facts' have been well-known for decades, attempts at their behavioral explanation have remained scarce. However, recently a new branch of...

We consider the problem of ex-ante forecasting conditional correlation patterns using ultra high frequency data. Flexible semiparametric predictors referring to the class of dynamic panel and dynamic factor models are adopted for daily forecasts. The parsimonious set up of our approach allows to...

Recently proposed models of risky choice imply systematic violations of transitivity of preference. Five studies explored whether people show patterns of intransitivity predicted by four descriptive models. To distinguish ?true? violations from those produced by ?error,? a model was fit in which...