Risk Aversion and the Value of Risk to Life

The standard literature on the value of life relies on Yaari’s (1965) model, which includes an implicit assumption of risk neutrality with respect to life duration. To overpass this limitation, we extend the theory to a simple variety of preferences which are not necessarily additively separable. The enlargement we propose is relevant for the evaluation of life-saving programs: current practice, we estimate, puts too little weight on mortality risk reduction of the young. Our correction exceeds in magnitude that introduced by the switch from the notion of number of lives saved to the notion of years of life saved

Partisanship, Ideology, and Representation in Latin America

This paper uses joint scaling methods and similar items from three large-scale surveys to place voters, parties and politicians from different Latin American countries on a common ideological space. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the findings reveal that the "median" voter in Latin America is located to the left of the ideological spectrum, and that voter's ideological locations are highly correlated with their partisan attachments. The location of parties and leaders suggests that three distinctive clusters exist: one located at the left of the political spectrum, another at the center, and a third to the right. The results also indicate that legislators in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru tend to be more "leftist" than their voters. The ideological drift, however, is not large enough to substantiate the claim that a representation gap exists in those countries

How Robust are Simulated Employment Effects of a Legal Minimum Wage in Germany?: A Comparison of Different Data Sources and Assumptions

Several empirical minimum wage studies have recently been published that simulate employment effects of a federal minimum wage in Germany. We disentangle various factors that explain the variation in previous simulation results. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the newly available Verdienststrukturerhebung 2006 we conduct robustness analyses that systematically test the range in the outcomes of different labor demand simulations. We find that labor demand effects are sensitive to measurement errors in wages, the representativeness of the sample with respect to several types of labor inputs as well as estimated and assumed labor demand and output price elasticities. Interactions of those determinants may lead to substantial differences in simulation outcomes

Real Tax Effects and Tax Perception Effects in Decisions on Asset Allocation

We test the predictions of the theoretical literature initiated by the study of Domar and Musgrave (1944) with a laboratory experiment in which subjects have to decide on the composition of an asset portfolio. Our simple design enables us to distinguish between Real Tax Effects and Perception Effects when a proportional income tax, with and without a full loss offset provision, is introduced. Observed investment behavior is partially inconsistent with the theoretical predictions if we do not control for the Perception Effects. However, if we consider these effects, we find support for the theory. The isolated Perception Effects can explain the unexpected behavior observed in previous studies and has both scientific and political implications

Taxes and the Valuation of Dividends: A Study of Dividend Announcements in Germany

This paper investigates the impact of the 2001 tax reform in Germany on dividend announcement returns. With this major tax reform, the full imputation system was replaced by the half-income system, which had a significant impact on the relative taxation of dividends and capital gains for most investor classes. In an event study framework, we separate the tax effect of dividends from their positive signaling and agency cost effects to offer a more comprehensive picture of the valuation implications of dividends in Germany. Controlling for signaling and agency cost effects of dividends we find that the market response to positive dividend surprises is more pronounced under the full imputation system, where dividends are generally more favorable to investors from a tax perspective, than under the half-income system. Our results suggest that the observed decline in the dividend response coefficient is synchronized with the 2001 tax reform and hence attributable to the 2001 tax reform

Employment Effects of Different Innovation Activities: Microeconometric Evidence

Using the model recently developed by Jaumandreu (2003) this paper reports new results on the relationship between innovation and employment growth in Germany. The model is tailor-made for analysing firm-level employment effects of innovations using specific information provided by CIS data. It establishes a theoretical link between employment growth and innovation output. The econometric analysis confirms that product innovations have a positive impact on employment. In contrast to previous studies, this effect is independent of the novelty degree. Moreover, different employment effects between manufacturing and service firms regarding process innovations were found. Finally, from a cross country perspective the results for Germany are similar to those found for Spain and the UK

A search for an unexpected asymmetry in the production of e+μ− and e−μ+ pairs in proton-proton collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector at root s = 13 TeV

This search, a type not previously performed at ATLAS, uses a comparison of the production cross sections for e(+)mu(-) and e(-)mu(+) pairs to constrain physics processes beyond the Standard Model. It uses 139 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data recorded at root s = 13 TeV at the LHC. Targeting sources of new physics which prefer final states containing e(+)mu(-) and e(-)mu(+), the search contains two broad signal regions which are used to provide model-independent constraints on the ratio of cross sections at the 2% level. The search also has two special selections targeting supersymmetric models and leptoquark signatures. Observations using one of these selections are able to exclude, at 95% confidence level, singly produced smuons with masses up to 640 GeV in a model in which the only other light sparticle is a neutralino when the R-parity-violating coupling lambda(23)(1)' is close to unity. Observations using the other selection exclude scalar leptoquarks with masses below 1880 GeV when g(1R)(eu) = g(1R)(mu c) = 1, at 95% confidence level. The limit on the coupling reduces to g(1R)(eu) = g(1R)(mu c) = 0.46 for a mass of 1420 GeV

Measurement of the nuclear modification factor for muons from charm and bottom hadrons in Pb+Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Heavy-flavour hadron production provides information about the transport properties and microscopic structure of the quark-gluon plasma created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A measurement of the muons from semileptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons produced in Pb+Pb and pp collisions at a nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. The Pb+Pb data were collected in 2015 and 2018 with sampled integrated luminosities of 208 mu b(-1) and 38 mu b(-1), respectively, and pp data with a sampled integrated luminosity of 1.17 pb(-1) were collected in 2017. Muons from heavy-flavour semileptonic decays are separated from the light-flavour hadronic background using the momentum imbalance between the inner detector and muon spectrometer measurements, and muons originating from charm and bottom decays are further separated via the muon track's transverse impact parameter. Differential yields in Pb+Pb collisions and differential cross sections in pp collisions for such muons are measured as a function of muon transverse momentum from 4 GeV to 30 GeV in the absolute pseudorapidity interval vertical bar eta vertical bar < 2. Nuclear modification factors for charm and bottom muons are presented as a function of muon transverse momentum in intervals of Pb+Pb collision centrality. The bottom muon results are the most precise measurement of b quark nuclear modification at low transverse momentum where reconstruction of B hadrons is challenging. The measured nuclear modification factors quantify a significant suppression of the yields of muons from decays of charm and bottom hadrons, with stronger effects for muons from charm hadron decays