Contributions published at Department of Economics (Florian Scheuer)

The paper takes a closer look at cultural festivals such as musical or operatic festivals. From an economic viewpoint the paper shows that such festivals offer great artistic and economic opportunities, but that at the same time these opportunities are also easy to destroy. Empirical evidence from the Salzburg Festival show that government support can have negative effects on the innovative and economically success of festivals by introducing distorting incentives and imposing all sorts of restrictions. The paper draws policy suggestions on how the state can support art festivals.

The Motivation Crowding Effect suggests that external intervention via monetary incentives or punishments may undermine, and under different identifiable conditions strengthen, intrinsic motivation. As of today, the theoretical possibility of motivation crowding has been the main subject of discussion among economists. This study demonstrates that the effect is also of empirical relevance. There exist a large number of studies, offering empirical evidence in support of the existence of crowding-out and crowding-in exists. The study is based on circumstantial evidence, laboratory studies by both psychologists and economists, as well as field research by econometric studies. The pieces of evidence presented refer to a wide variety of areas of the economy and society and have been collected for many different countries and periods of time. Crowding effects thus are an empirically relevant phenomenon, which can, in specific cases, even dominate the traditional relative price effect.

We study the employment and distributional effects of regulating (reducing) working time in a general equilibrium model with search-matching frictions. Job creation entails fixed costs, but existing jobs are subject to diminishing returns. We characterize the equilibrium in the de-regulated economy where firms and individual workers freely negotiate wages and hours. Then, we consider the effects of a legislation restricting the maximum working time, while we let wages respond endogenously. Employment effects are sensitive to the representation of preferences. In our benchmark, small reductions in working time, starting from the laissez-faire equilibrium solution, always result in a small increase in the equilibrium employment, while larger reductions reduce employment. The regulation benefits workers, both unemployed and employed (even if wages decrease and even in cases where employment falls), but reduces profits and output.

This study applies conjoint analysis (CA) to estimate the marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) of elderly individuals for a reduction of the risk of fracture of the femur. The good in question are hypothetical hip protectors which lower the risk of a fracture by different amounts. Other attributes are ease of handling, wearing comfort, and out-of-pocket cost. Thus, the novelty of the present work lies in its letting risk reduction be traded off against several attributes. In 500 face-to-face interviews, pensioners stated whether or not they would buy the product. Results suggest that MWTP for wearing comfort exceeds that for risk reduction. Indeed, willingness to pay for the product as a whole is negative, indicating that it should not be included as a mandatory benefit in health insurance.

This paper studies a network provider's incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. In a simple but general framework, we investigate how various institutional settings affect investment incentives. We show that under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives are smaller under vertical separation than under vertical integration. We consider two strategies for improving investment incentives under vertical separation. First, the introduction of competition for the market can sometimes improve incentives. Second, with non-linear access prices investment incentives under separation become identical to those under integration.

Many of the most important choices in people's lives have an inter-temporal dimension, i.e., these choices are associated with a flow of benefits or costs that accrue in the future. In addition, such choices are frequently habit- forming. Yet, little is known about habit-forming inter-temporal choice behavior. This paper reports the results of an inter-temporal choice experiment with habit-formation. Subjects' choices deviate systematically from individually optimal decisions in the direction of over consumption. This over- consumption is partly driven by loss avoidance, comparable to a real life situation in which addicted people consume addictive substances only in order to overpower withdrawal symptoms. Our results thus reject the theory of rational addiction.

Money illusion means that people behave differently when the same objective situation is represented in nominal terms rather than in real terms. This paper shows that seemingly innocuous differences in payoff representation cause pronounced differences in nominal price inertia indicating the behavioral importance of money illusion. In particular, if the payoff information is presented to subjects in nominal terms, price expectations and actual price choices after a fully anticipated negative nominal shock are much stickier than when payoff information is presented in real terms. In addition we show that money illusion causes asymmetric effects of negative and positive nominal shocks. While nominal inertia is quite substantial and long-lasting after a negative shock, it is rather small after a positive shock.

This paper shows that reciprocity has powerful implications for many economicndomains. It is an important determinant in the enforcement of contracts and social norms and enhances the possibilities of collective action greatly. Reciprocity may render the provision of explicit incentive inefficient because the incentives may crowd out voluntary co-operation. It strongly limits the effects of competition in markets with incomplete contracts and gives rise to noncompetitive wage differences. Finally, reciprocity it is also a strong force contributing to the existence of incomplete contracts.n

The present paper analyzes the consequences of a consumption tax reform for the export sector. In particular, it offers an explanation why exporters support such a reform although economic theory basically predicts trade neutrality. To this purpose, the basic neoclassical model is replaced with two Keynesian assumptions, i.e. sticky wages and absence of perfect foresight. It is derived that in both cases the export sector expands in the short run. However, with sticky wages, this is only possible if, at the same time, the central bank fixes the exchange rate. In the absence of perfect foresight, on the other hand, the additional condition for the tax reform to increase exports is that the government balances its budget in each period.

Based upon time series data published by PTT prior to regulatory reform, this paper investigates whether Swiss telecommunications qualify as a natural monopoly. Employing the subadditivity concept for multiproduct industries, alternative specifications of quadratic cost functions are estimated. The results of these estimations are ambiguous and demonstrate the difficulty of empirically substantiating a natural monoply claim. It is argued that the natural monopoly concept is of limited usefulness for informing policy decisions.

This paper develops a simple reduced form model of two-way network competition with linear retail pricing. Using the techniques of supermodular games, it is demonstrated that the most important results from the existing literature do not depend on routinely invoked assumptions, such as specific functional forms or the symmetry of the network operators. In particular, it is demonstrated that (i) firms do not need to be symmetric or regulated to have incentives to collude in access pricing, and (ii) due to the effects on social welfare, enforcing colluding firms to behave noncooperatively is not necessarily desirable.

This paper analyzes the impact of formal training on worker mobility. Using data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey, we find that on-the-job search activities and, to a smaller extent, actual job separations are significantly affected by both employer-provided and general training. Moreover, while the separation probability of searching workers is strongly affected by previous firm-provided training, no such effect shows up for non-searchers. This is consistent with the hypothesis that workers bear most of the cost of specific training.

"Due to its formality and highly analytic thinking, economics is often attributed a leading role among the social sciences and a prominent position as contributor to economic or social issues in the real world. Fact is, however, that the empirical proof for such a claim is either missing or anecdotal. This paper aims to outline the “economics of economics”. It surveys and compares approaches of impact measurement such as a production function of economics or the demand and supply of trained economists and discusses the determinants of the strength of the influence of economics. It furthermore discriminates between the impact of economic ideas versus that of economists as scientists or politicians."

I measure the benefit to households of the 1992 Cable Act in light of strategic responses by cable systems to the regulations mandated by the act. A discrete-choice differentiated-product model of household demand for all offered cable television services forms the basis of the analysis. Aggregation over households and service combinations to the level of the data permits estimation on a cross-section of cable markets from before and after the act. The results indicate that while the regulations mandated price reductions of 10–17% for cable services, observed system responses yielded no change in household welfare. Post-act changes in cable prices are responsible for most of the difference.

This paper reviews the recent theoretical and empirical literature that relates education to growth, and draws some lessons for the Swedish experience. First, the “human capital accumulation” approach is discussed: agents decide, at each moment of their lives, to forego time or resources to improve their future productivity. The quality of the educational system is argued to be a crucial determinant of the decision to invest in human capital and of the growth rate of the economy. Hence, qualified teachers and appropriate incentive schemes within the schooling sectors are important for the long-run performance of the economy. Next, the trade-off between basic innovation (promoted by a restricted subset of economic activities) and learning-by-doing (which occurs at a more diffuse level in the economy) is analysed. It is argued that the former can be fostered by investments in “elite” research institutions, while the latter depends on the average educational attainment of the working population. Finally, the relationship between education, growth and inequality is discussed. The second part of the paper analyses recent trends in educational attainments in Sweden. Data show that enrolment rates in tertiary education in Sweden have lagged behind the major industrialised countries during the 1980s. Quantitatively, however, this is unlikely to be a major explanation of the productivity slowdown experienced by Sweden after 1970. But it is emphasised that (i) low educational premiums may harm incentives for people to invest in human capital; and (ii) low relative wages and low-power incentive schemes for teachers may cause a deterioration in the quality of education with negative effects on long-run growth.

This paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on inequality and growth. After discussing historical and more recent distributional trends as well as empirical evidence on the relationship between inequality and growth, I focus on recent explanations of the inequality-growth puzzle. I consider both the impact of the functional and the personal distribution on long-run growth rates. A final section discusses a rather neglected issue in the recent literature: the impact of expected demand for innovation decisions.

This article's point of departure is that the individual has to manage three stochastic assets, namely health, wealth, and wisdom (skills), which tend to be positively correlated. It shows that the unexpected components of insurance payments should be negatively correlated for minimizing total asset volatility. The empirical finding is that in the United States, Japan, and Germany, the lines of social insurance contribute less to diversification than do those of private insurance. The article concludes with suggestions for new, umbrella-type insurance contracts that in the future should help individuals in the efficient management of their assets.

This paper discusses the specification and estimation of seemingly unrelated multivariate count data models. A new model with negative binomial marginals is proposed. In contrast to a previous model based on the multivariate Poisson distribution, the new model allows for over-dispersion, a phenomenon that is frequently encountered in economic count data. Semi-parametric estimation is possible if some of the assumption of the fully specified model are violated.

null