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The role of bounded rationality and imperfect information in subgame perfect implementation - an empirical investigation

In this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which Moore and Repullo’s subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth-telling, both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty regarding the good’s value. We find that Moore–Repullo mechanisms fail to implement truth-telling in a…

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English / 01/02/2018

The dynamics of norm formation and norm decay

Social norms are a ubiquitous feature of social life and pervade almost every aspect of human social interaction. However, despite their importance we still have relatively little empirical knowledge about the forces that drive the formation, the maintenance and the decay of social norms. In particular, our knowledge about how norms affect behavior and how norm obedience and…

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English / 01/02/2018

Efficient weighting: a more powerful test for cross-sectional anomalies

Many researchers seek factors that predict the cross-section of stock returns. The standard methodology sorts stocks according to their factor scores into quantiles and forms a corresponding long-short portfolio. Such a course of action ignores any information on the covariance matrix of stock returns. Historically, it has been difficult to estimate the covariance matrix for a large…

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English / 01/02/2018

Voluntary disclosure in unfair contests

This paper studies incentives for the interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Considered are unfair contests, i.e., contests in which, subject to activity conditions, one player (the favorite) is interim always more likely to win than the other player (the underdog). A condition is identified that ensures that a given contest is…

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English / 01/02/2018

Ventral striatal dysfunction and symptom expression in individuals with schizotypal personality traits and early psychosis

Striatal abnormalities play a crucial role in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Growing evidence suggests an association between aberrant striatal activity during reward anticipation and symptom dimensions in schizophrenia. However, it is not clear whether this holds across the psychosis continuum. The aim of the present study was to investigate alterations of ventral striatal…

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English / 13/01/2018

Balanced bootstrap joint confidence bands for structural impulse response functions

Constructing joint confidence bands for structural impulse response functions based on a VAR model is a difficult task because of the non-linear nature of such functions. We propose new joint confidence bands that cover the entire true structural impulse response function up to a chosen maximum horizon with a prespecified probability (1 − α), at least asymptotically. Such bands are…

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English / 01/01/2018

Money vs. time: family income, maternal labor supply, and child development

We study the effect of family income and maternal hours worked on child development. Our instrumental variable analysis suggests different results for cognitive and behavioral development. An additional 1,000 USD in family income improves cognitive development by 4.4 percent of a standard deviation but has no effect on behavioral development. A yearly increase of 100 work hours…

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English / 01/01/2018

Does altruism matter for remittances?

We provide a direct test of the impact of altruism on remittances. From a sample of Indian migrant workers in Qatar, we elicit the propensity to share with others from their responses in a dictator game and use it as a proxy for altruism. For the entire sample, we find that altruism does not seem to matter. However, we document a strong positive relationship between altruism and…

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English / 01/01/2018

Redefine statistical significance

We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance from 0.05 to 0.005 for claims of new discoveries.

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English / 01/01/2018

Demand forces of technical change evidence from the Chinese manufacturing industry

This paper investigates the effct of domestic market size on innovation activities across different durable good industries in the Chinese manufacturing sector. We address the endogeneity of market size by an IV strategy, based on a measure of potential market size, which is driven only by changes in the Chinese income distribution. This measure is exogenous to changes in prices and…

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English / 01/01/2018

Unemployment insurance and the labor market

The existing literature assumes that unemployment insurance (UI) affects the labor market through the job finding rate of eligible workers. I argue that this focus is too narrow. I show evidence for UI effects through three other margins: (i) search externalities; (ii) takeup of other welfare state programs; and (iii) job separations. This suggests that the analysis of optimal UI…

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English / 01/01/2018

Intergenerational mobility in the 19th century: micro-level evidence from the city of Zurich

We analyze social mobility of decennial citizenry cohorts of Zurich born between 1780 and 1870. We categorize individuals according to their occupations and use different measures to show the level, change, and components of intergenerational mobility. Mobility was imperfect and weakly decreasing over time. Both level and change are driven by intergenerational persistence of…

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English / 01/01/2018

Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex updates chosen value according to choice set size

Having chosen an item typically increases the subjective value of the chosen item, and people generally enjoy making choices from larger choice sets. However, having too many items to choose from can reduce the value of chosen items—for example, because of conflict or choice difficulty. In this study, we investigated the effects of choice set size on behavioral and neural value…

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English / 01/01/2018

Multigrading and child achievement

We exploit Italian law DPR 81/2009, which determines class composition, as an instrument to identify the causal effect of grouping students of different grades into a single class (multigrading) on children cognitive achievement. This article focuses on 7-year-old students—those at the beginning of their formal education. Results suggest that attendance in multigrade classes versus…

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English / 01/01/2018

Daten gegen Armut

Neue Methoden zeigen Spendern, wofür sich das Geldgeben wirklich lohnt. Ein Gastbeitrag von Johannes Haushofer, Dina Pomeranz, Max Roser und Frank Schilbach

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Deutsch / 22/12/2017

Long-range growth: economic development in the global network of air links

We study the impact of international long-distance flights on the global spatial allocation of economic activity. To identify causal effects, we exploit variation due to regulatory and technological constraints which give rise to a discontinuity in connectedness between cities at a distance of 6,000 miles. We show that improving an airport’s position in the network of air links has a…

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English / 20/12/2017

Laboratory measure of cheating predicts school misconduct

Laboratory experiments provide insights into the drivers of cheating behaviour, but it is unclear to what extent cheating in the lab generalizes to the field. We conducted an experiment with middle and high school students to test whether a common laboratory measure of cheating predicts three types of school misconduct: (i) disruptiveness in class, (ii) homework non-completion, and (…

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English / 01/12/2017

Optimal search from multiple distributions with infinite horizon

With infinite horizon, optimal rules for sequential search from a known distribution feature a constant reservation value that is independent of whether recall of past options is possible. We extend this result to the the case when there are multiple distributions to choose from: it is optimal to sample from the same distribution in every period and to continue searching until a…

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English / 01/12/2017

A note on the analysis of two-stage task results: how changes in task structure affect what model-free and model-based strategies predict about the effects of reward and transition on the stay probability

Many studies that aim to detect model-free and model-based influences on behavior employ two-stage behavioral tasks of the type pioneered by Daw and colleagues in 2011. Such studies commonly modify existing two-stage decision paradigms in order to better address a given hypothesis, which is an important means of scientific progress. It is, however, critical to fully appreciate the…

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English / 01/12/2017

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