Nonrenewable Resources, Strategic Behavior and the Hotelling Rule: An Experiment

This study uses the methods of experimental economics to investigate possible causes for the failure of the Hotelling rule for nonrenewable resources. We argue that as long as resource stocks are large enough, producers may choose to (partially) ignore the dynamic component of their production decision, shifting production to the present and focusing more on strategic behavior. We experimentally vary stock size in a nonrenewable resource duopoly setting and find that producers with large stocks indeed pay significantly less attention to variables related to dynamic optimization,leading to a failure of the Hotelling rule

Empirical Analysis of the Assessment of Innovation Effects in U.S. Merger Cases

In this empirical study all mergers that have been challenged by the U.S. antitrust agencies FTC and DOJ between 1995 and 2008 were analyzed in regard to the question to what extent and how the agencies assessed the innovation effects of mergers. Theoretical background is the still open question how negative effects of mergers on innovation should be taken into account in merger policy. Although we can show in our study that in one third of all challenged mergers also innovation concerns were raised, the results also point to a still existing large degree of uneasiness and inconsistencies of the agencies in regard to the assessment of innovation effects. A particularly interesting result is that - despite the wide-spread rejection of the "innovation market approach" in the antitrust debate - the agencies used more an innovationspecific assessment approach that includes also innovation in the market definition than the pure traditional product market concept. Additionally, we also found significant differences between the assessment approaches of the FTC and the DOJ

Time and Financial Transfers Within and Beyond the Family

Research on time and financial transfers is often conducted along two distinct lines—transfers within the family and transfers beyond the family—without considering the fact that these transfers are actually interrelated. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), this article investigates the links between the two groups of transfers. Transfers within and beyond the family were found to be complements. Income and wealth are strong predictors of financial transfers. Black and Hispanic families lag systematically in the generosity to help the people both within and beyond their families.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43105/1/10834_2006_Article_9013.pd

Wage Effects of Recruitment Methods: The Case of the Italian Social Service Sector

This essay analyzes the role of different recruitment channels, and of informal networks in particular, on wage structures across various organization types in the Italian social service sector. While the impact of recruitment methods on wages has been addressed in several previous contributions, none of them focuses on social services. Comparison of outcomes across organization types within the same sector is in itself another novelty, as compared to previous studies that generally focus on differences across sectors or, more recently, across countries. The main findings are that nonprofit organizations prefer informal recruitment methods to better select the most motivated workers, namely those workers who share the nonprofit mission. Furthermore the impact of informal contacts on the wage structure explains much of the unobserved wage differentials across organization type. © 2009 Physica-Verlag Heidelberg