This paper shows that increases in the minimum wage rate can have ambiguous effects on the working hours and welfare of employed workers in competitive labor markets. The reason is that employers may not comply with the minimum wage legislation and instead pay a lower subminimum wage rate. If...

The minimum wage rate has been introduced in many countries as a means of alleviating the poverty of the working poor. This paper shows, however, that an imperfectly enforced minimum wage rate causes small firms to face an upward-sloping labor supply schedule. Since this turns these firms into...

We propose a method to test a prediction of the distribution of a stochastic process. In a non-Bayesian non-parametric setting, a predicted distribution is tested using a realization of the stochastic process. A test associates a set of realizations for each predicted distribution, on which the...

My own behavior baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe." Saint Paul What behavior can be explained using the hypothesis that the agent faces temptation but is otherwise a standard rational agent"? In earlier work, GulPesendorfer [2001] use...

I distinguish two types of macroeconomic models. The first type are top-down models in which some or all agents are capable of understanding the whole picture and use this superior information to determine their optimal plans. The second type are bottom-up models in which all agents experience...

Thema dieses Papers sind die Bestimmungsfaktoren der Mediaselektion und ihr Bezug zu theoretischen Konzepten. Die Bestimmungsfaktoren der Mediaselektion lassen sich in qualitative und quantitative Kriterien untergliedern. Als wichtigstes Kriterium konnte in zahlreichen Umfragen die...

There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies,...

Discrete choice models of labor supply easily account for nonlinearty and nonconvexity in budget sets caused by tax-benefit systems. As a result, they have become very popular for ex ante evaluations of policy reforms. In this paper, we question whether the degree of flexibility and the implicit...

We characterize optimal IPO design in the distinct adverse selection problems: one affecting the IPO stage and one arising in the after-market. Allocating shares to an investor with superior information in the after-market depresses the share's value to less informed investors. However, because...