This paper contributes to a recent debate about the structural and institutional conditions under which discretion may be superior to timeless perspective. We show this is unlikely when the policy maker relies on a welfare-theoretic loss function obtained as a second-order approximation of...

We consider customer joining behaviour for a system that consists of a FCFS queue with Bernoulli feedback. A consequence of the feedback characteristic is that the sojourn time of a customer already in the system depends on the joining decisions taken by future arrivals to the system. By...

The aim of this paper is to compare the financial performance of Austrian SRI funds to the performance of Austrian conventional funds. 43 SRI and 1395 conventional funds are found for the analysis. Jensen’s alpha and Carhart’s 4-factor alpha are used to evaluate fund performance. The results...

This paper traces the human capital development of 14 Asian countries for the period of 1900-60, using the age-heaping method. We place special emphasis on the gender gap in numeracy and its determinants. In particular, we test the validity of a U-hypothesis of gender equality, implying that...

In the two-country Melitz (2003) model, unilateral trade liberalization is often cast as a reduction of iceberg transportation costs and wages are determined by a linear outside sector. We show that welfare results reverse when wages adjust and trade frictions are revenue-generating tariffs.

In this paper we study the impact of the international migration of unskilled workers on skill formation and the average skill level in the home country. We analyze what appears to be the least threatening scenario from the point of view of its effect on the supply of skills at home: namely,...

In New Trade Theory models, the larger region hosts an overproportionate share of producers. This Home Market Effect (HME) exacerbates regional income discrepancies caused by trade frictions or technology differences. With homogeneous firms, it requires inter-industry reallocations to emerge. We...

Member countries of a currency union like the euro area have absorbed asymmetric shocks in ways that are inconsistent with a common nominal anchor. Based on a reformulation of the gravity model that allows for such bilateral misalignment, we disentangle the conventional microeconomic trade...

This paper analyzes the role of ethnic communities in shaping the recent immigration boom to Spain. We find that ethnic communities exerted a strong positive effect on the scale and a strong negative effect on the skill structure of this immigration. Unlike previous studies, we explicitly...

We examine the interplay between changes in the functional distribution of income and the distribution of market income among households. We use micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel as well as macro data from the German Federal Statistical Office from 2002 to 2008. We categorize and...