Women, identity and employment in East Germany

This book chapter was reproduced with the kind permission of Continuum books.This book chapter discusses Marxist feminism and female employment in the GDR, current attitudes to employment amongst East German women, and pre-unification versus post-unification factors and their impact on identity formation

Development of multi-use concepts to fight against climate change in the project MUNTER

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On conjugate points and the Leitmann equivalent problem approach

This article extends the Leitmann equivalence method to a class of problems featuring conjugate points. The class is characterised by the requirement that the set of indifference points of a given problem forms a finite stratification.

Tax Competition, Relative Performance and Policy Imitation

Rather than about absolute payoffs, governments in fiscal competition often seem to care about their performance relative to other governments. Moreover, they often appear to mimic policies observed elsewhere. We study such behaviour in a tax competition game with mobile capital à la Zodrow-Mieszkowski. Both with relative payoff concerns and for imitative policies, evolutionary stability is the appropriate solution concept. It renders tax competition more aggressive than with best-reply policies (Nash equilibrium). Whatever the number of jurisdictions involved, an evolutionary stable tax policy coincides with the competitive outcome of a tax competition game played among infinitely many governments. Tax competition among boundedly rational governments, thus, involves drastic efficiency losses.fiscal competition, relative performance, tax mimicking, evolutionary stability

Skiba points for small discount rates

The present article uses perturbation techniques to approximate the value function of an economic minimisation problem for small values of the discount rate. This can be used to obtain the approximate location of Skiba states (or indifference thresholds) in the problem; these are states for which there are two distinct optimal state trajectories, converging to different optimal steady states. It is shown that the sets of indifference thresholds are locally smooth manifolds. For a simple example, all relevant quantities are computed explicitely. Moreover, the approximation can be used to obtain parameter-dependent approximatons to indifference manifolds.

Linear risk tolerance and mean-variance preferences

We translate the property of linear risk tolerance (hyperbolical Arrow-Pratt index of risk aversion) from the expected-utility framework into a condition on the marginal rate of substitution between return and risk in the mean-variance approach.

Equilibrium dynamics with different types of pay-as-you-go pension schemes

We analyse the steady-state equilibrium dynamics of an OLG economy with a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension scheme that relates old-age pensions to previous earnings. Contrary to an economy where PAYG pensions depend on the earnings of those currently working, such an economy may experience complex equilibrium dynamics with endogenous cycles and bifurcations.bifurcations

Shallow lake economics run deep: Nonlinear aspects of an economic-ecological interest conflict

Outcomes of the shallow lake interest conflict are presented in a number of different contexts: quasi-static and dynamic social planning, and quasi-static one-shot and repeated non-cooperative play. As the underlying dynamics are non-convex, the analysis uses geometrical-numerical methods: the possible kinds of solutions are efficiently classified in bifurcation diagrams