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Economists use three types of models to describe volunteer labour supply: the public-goods model, the private-consumption model, and the human-capital model. We used data from an online survey questionnaire of volunteers working for the German Red Cross to study the extent to which utility components representing these three types help to explain volunteer labour supply. We analysed the survey data using boosted regression trees, where we controlled for several other potentially important socioeconomic correlates of volunteer labour supply. We used measures of relative influence and partial dependence plots to analyse the strength and the direction of the correlation of the utility components and the other socioeconomic variables with volunteer labour supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an influential article, Raj Chetty (2009, 'Is the Taxable Income Elasticity Sufficient to Calculate Deadweight Loss? The Implications of Evasion and Avoidance.' American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 1 (2):31-52) argues that in the presence of tax evasion the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is no longer a sufficient statistic for the marginal efficiency cost of funds (MECF). We show that, under Chetty's (2009, 'Is the Taxable Income Elasticity Sufficient to Calculate Deadweight Loss? The Implications of Evasion and Avoidance.' American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 1 (2):31-52) risk-neutrality assumption, correctly measuring the standard MECF only requires adding detected evasion inclusive of penalties. In the more general case of risk aversion, it further requires amending the formula to address the private risk-bearing cost of tax evasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many successful examples of economic development, such as South Korea, exhibit long periods of sustained capital accumulation. This process is characterized by a gradually rising investment rate along with a moderate rate of return to capital, both of which are strongly at odds with the standard neoclassical growth model that predicts an initially high and then declining investment rate with an extremely high return to capital. We show that minor modifications of the neoclassical model go a long way toward accounting for the capital accumulation path of the South Korean economy. Our modifications recognize that (i) agriculture (which makes up a large share of the aggregate economy in the early stage of development) does not rely much on capital and (ii) the relative price of capital declined substantially during the transition period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does factor accumulation affect an open economy's pattern of international specialization and returns to capital? We provide a new integrated treatment to this question using a panel of 44 developing and developed countries over the period 1976-2000. The data confirm the Heckscher-Ohlin prediction that, with sufficient differences in country endowments, there is no factor price equalization and countries specialize in different subsets of goods. Innovatively, we obtain the returns to capital implied by this model: these are consistent with the Lucas paradox, which we explain after accounting for cross-country differences in the cost of capital goods. Our findings are also consistent with Ventura's hypothesis that the growth of small open economies can be promoted by "beating the curse of diminishing returns" -- indeed we find no decrease in the return to capital at any given capital-labor ratio despite capital accumulation by most countries within a cone of diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]