Mental accounts as a psychological phenomenon can induce labeling effects in the decisions of households. In particular, child benefits have a clear "child" label that may lead to a higher marginal propensity to consume child goods than adult goods. To explore the labeling effect, we use a natural experiment of a policy reform that increased child benefits substantially for third children but l...

Content Addressable Storage (CAS) is increasingly being used as a technique to provide for space savings when storing datasets. In this paper we analyze the performance of CAS on real-world applications and discuss the effects on space savings, savings in network bandwidth and on resultant error resilience of data. We find that a chunksize of 1 KB can provide up to 84% space savings and even hi...

In the first chapter, I investigate a merger between price-setting newsvendors in an oligopolistic market. It is well-known that inventory pooling can greatly reduce inventory costs in a centralized distribution system because it helps reduce aggregate demand uncertainty. Although such statistical economies of scale are important benefits of a retail merger, the extant literature models cost sa...

Several theoretical studies suggest that only uninsured depositors have an incentive to discipline their banks, i. e. react with changes in deposit volumes or in required interest rates as a reaction to changes in banks’ risk. This paper empirically investigates whether German savings banks are disciplined by their depositors although these should be regarded as fully insured due to public guar...

In this report, I will outline the most relevant economic mechanisms that follow a technical efficiency gain in the context of environmental resources and the energy market. For many years, the impact of a decoupling from GDP growth and the consumption of natural resources on macroeconomic savings has been overestimated by both economists and politicians. It was widely believed that the overall...

To reduce the potential costs of combat, animals may rely upon signals to resolve territorial disputes. Signals also provide a means for individuals to appear better than they actually are, deceiving opponents and gaining access to resources that would otherwise be unattainable. However, other than resource gains, incentives for dishonest signalling remain unexplored. In this study, we tested t...

 Asset levels growing: In 2012, there was $17.8 billion in health savings accounts (HSAs) and health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs), spread across 11.6 million accounts, according to data from the 2012 EBRI/MGA Consumer Engagement in Health Care Survey, sponsored by EBRI and Matthew Greenwald & Associates. This was up from 2006, when there were 1.3 million accounts with $873.4 million in as...

This paper addresses the kinematics of the Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator Systems (UVMSs). Due the adittional degrees of freedom (dofs) provided by the vehicle, such systems are kinematically redundant, i.e. they possess more dofs than those required to execute a given task, and need to be solved using some redundancy technique. We present an approach based on introducing kinematic constraints....

In this paper, we show that the existence of a large, negative wealth shock and insufficient insurance against such a shock could explain both the limited stock market participation puzzle and the low-consumption–high-savings puzzle. We then conduct an empirical analysis on the relation between household portfolio choices and access to private insurance and various types of government safety ne...