This paper investigates the effectiveness of an employment program exclusively run by and in a private sector firm, in order to find out whether a private program without cream-skimming can be beneficial to (a) the individual private firm and (b) society at large by outperforming public...

In this paper we introduce the concept of rational probability measures. These are probabilitymeasures that map every Borel event to a rational number. We show that a rational probabilitymeasure has a finite support. As a consequence we prove a new version of Kolmogorov extensiontheorem. In the...

Using data on individuals of age 50 and older from 11 European countries, we analyze two economic aspects of subjective well-being of older Europeans: satisfaction with household income, and job satisfaction. Both have been shown to contribute substantially to overall well-being (satisfaction...

We consider the problem of minimizing the makespan on restricted related parallel machines. In restricted machine scheduling each job is only allowed to be scheduled on a subset of machines. We study the worst-case behavior of local search algorithms. In particular, we analyze the quality of...

Collective decisions are modeled by preference correspondences (rules). In particular, we focus ona new condition: "update monotonicity" for preference rules. Although many so-called impossibilitytheorems for the choice rules are based on -or related to- monotonicity conditions, this...

In this paper we study the effect of information on the occurrence of intentional price wars on the equilibrium path. An episode of low prices is an intentional price war if it follows a period of high prices which was ended intentionally by one of the firms in the market (the price war leader)....

In spite of the increased use of factor-augmented regressions in recent years, little is knownregarding the relative merits of the two main approaches to estimation and inference, namely, thecross-sectional average and principal components estimators. As a response to this, the currentpaper...

We consider a model where agents differ in their preferences about consumption labor and health,in their (health-dependent) earning ability, and in their health disposition. We study the jointtaxation of income and health expenditure, under incentive-compatibility constraints, on the basisof...

This paper investigates exceptional phases of stock market cycles. Defined in Pagan and Sossounov (2003) as unusual, they are detected as outliers in the historical distribution. Moreover, this study completes the growing literature on stock market bulls and bears in several aspects. First,it...

Predicting the occurrence of extreme prices, so-called spikes, is one of the greatest challengeswhen modeling electricity spot prices. Despite the fact that recently new insights have beenachieved, the contemporaneous literature seems to be still at its beginning of understanding...