infonet-economy

In the 5th edition of the UBS Center Public Paper Series, Dominic Rohner shows how conflict-torn countries can escape the vicious cycle of war and destruction. Much of the economics and political science literature on wars and conflict has focused on things that are hard for policymakers to change (natural resources, ethnic composition, and weather shocks). While this paper also…

Multi-echo fMRI data acquisition has been widely investigated and suggested to optimize sensitivity for detecting the BOLD signal. Several methods have also been proposed for the combination of data with different echo times. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether these advanced echo combination methods provide advantages over the simple averaging of echoes when…

This paper introduces a model of limited consumer attention into an otherwise standard new trade theory model with love-of-variety preferences and heterogeneous firms. In this setting, we show that international integration needs not be welfare enhancing if the consumers' capacity to gather and process information is limited. Rather, it intensifies competition for scarce…

This paper analyzes the developmental origins and the evolution of health, cognitive, and socio-emotional skills during early childhood, from age 0 to 5. We explicitly model the dynamic interactions of health with the child’s behavior and cognitive skills, as well as the role of parental investment. A dynamic factor model corrects for the presence of measurement error in the proxy…

Neurobiological models of self-control predominantly focus on the role of prefrontal brain mechanisms involved in emotion regulation and impulse control. We provide evidence for an entirely different neural mechanism that promotes self-control by overcoming bias for the present self, a mechanism previously thought to be mainly important for interpersonal decision-making. In two…

As globalization brings people with incompatible attitudes into contact, cultural conflicts inevitably arise. Little is known about how to mitigate conflict and about how the conflicts that occur can shape the cultural evolution of the groups involved. Female genital cutting is a prominent example1, 2, 3. Governments and international agencies have promoted the abandonment of cutting…

This introductory umbrella chapter interlinks the three essays of this dissertation thesis and explains their stance towards the economic discipline. The essays focus on two key exchange rate puzzles, which are the forward premium puzzle of Fama (1984) and the consumption real exchange rate correlation puzzle of Backus and Smith (1993). As regards the first puzzle, this thesis…

Given that the range of rewarding and punishing outcomes of actions is large but neural coding capacity is limited, efficient processing of outcomes by the brain is necessary. One mechanism to increase efficiency is to rescale neural output to the range of outcomes expected in the current context, and process only experienced deviations from this expectation. However, this mechanism…

This paper considers the optimal design of dynamic research contests when the buyer can set time-dependent prizes. We derive the buyer-optimal contest and show that it entails an increasing prize schedule. Remarkably, this allows the buyer to implement a global stopping rule. In particular, the optimal contest attains the first-best. More generally, we show that global stopping rules…