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Overcoming therapeutic inertia in multiple sclerosis care: a pilot randomized trial applying the traffic light system in medical education

Background: Physicians often do not initiate or intensify treatments when clearly warranted, a phenomenon known as therapeutic inertia (TI). Limited information is available on educational interventions to ameliorate knowledge-to-action gaps in TI.
Objectives: To evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of an educational intervention compared to usual care among practicing…

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English / 01/08/2017

A causal account of the brain network computations underlying strategic social behavior

During competitive interactions, humans have to estimate the impact of their own actions on their opponent's strategy. Here we provide evidence that neural computations in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) and interconnected structures are causally involved in this process. By combining inhibitory continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation with model-based…

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English / 10/07/2017

Reducing child mortality in the last mile: a randomized social entrepreneurship intervention in Uganda

The delivery of basic health products and services remains abysmal in many parts of the world where child mortality is high. This paper shows the results from a largescale randomized evaluation of a novel “social entrepreneurship” approach to health care delivery. In randomly selected villages a sales agent was locally recruited and incentivized to conduct home visits, educate…

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English / 06/07/2017

Female market work, tax regimes, and the rise of the service sector

US regional variation shows a positive correlation between the size of the service economy and female market hours, which is partially driven by different tax regimes. Based on this fact, this paper develops a multi-sector model to: (1) quantify the effect of different tax regimes in incentivizing woman to enter the labor force, and (2) estimate the feedback effect from women…

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English / 01/07/2017

Networks in conflict: theory and evidence from the Great War of Africa

We study from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective how a network of military alliances and enmities affects the intensity of a conflict. The model combines elements from network theory and from the politico-economic theory of conflict. We obtain a closed-form characterization of the Nash equilibrium. Using the equilibrium conditions, we perform an empirical analysis using…

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English / 01/07/2017

De-biasing strategic communication

This paper studies the effect of disclosing conflicts of interest on strategic communication when the sender has lying costs. I present a simple economic mechanism under which such disclosure often leads to more informative, but at the same time also to more biased messages. This benefits rational receivers but exerts a negative externality from them on naive or delegating receivers…

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English / 01/07/2017

Growth and welfare effects of intellectual property rights when consumers differ in income

This paper analyzes how changing the expected length of intellectual property (IP) protection affects economic growth and the welfare of rich and poor consumers. The analysis is based on a product-variety model with non-homothetic preferences and endogenous markups in which, in accordance with empirical evidence, rich households consume a larger variety of goods than poorer ones. The…

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English / 01/07/2017

Beyond sorting: 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 / 01/07/2017

A neural link between generosity and happiness

Generous behaviour is known to increase happiness, which could thereby motivate generosity. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging and a public pledge for future generosity to investigate the brain mechanisms that link generous behaviour with increases in happiness. Participants promised to spend money over the next 4 weeks either on others (experimental group)…

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English / 01/07/2017

Brain versus brawn: the realization of women's comparative advantage

In the last decades the US economy experienced a rise in female labor force participation, a reversal of the gender education gap and a closing of the gender wage gap. Importantly, these changes occurred at a substantially different pace over time. During the same period, workers in the US faced a considerable shift in labor demand from more physical to more intellectual skill…

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English / 01/06/2017

Systematic consumption risk in currency returns

We sort currencies into portfolios by countries’ past consumption growth. The excess return of the highest- over the lowest-consumption-growth portfolio – our consumption carry factor – compensates for negative returns during world-wide downturns and prices the cross-section of portfolio-sorted and of bilateral currency returns. Empirically, sorting currencies on consumption growth…

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English / 01/06/2017

Voting with public information

We study the effect of public information on collective decision-making in committees, where members can have both common and conflicting interests. In the presence of public information, the simple and efficient vote-your-signal strategy profile no longer constitutes an equilibrium under the commonly-used simultaneous voting rules, while the intuitive but inefficient follow-the-…

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English / 01/06/2017

On linear transformations of intersections

For any linear transformation and two convex closed sets, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for when the transformation of the intersection of the sets coincides with the intersection of their images. We also identify analogous conditions for non-convex sets, general transformations, and multiple sets. We demonstrate the usefulness of our results via an application to…

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English / 01/06/2017

Inducing variety: a theory of innovation contests

This paper analyzes the design of innovation contests when the quality of an innovation depends on the research approach, but the best approach is unknown. Inducing a variety of research approaches is desirable because it generates an option value. We show that suitable contests can induce such variety. The optimal contest is a bonus tournament, where suppliers can choose only…

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English / 01/06/2017

Job mobility and creative destruction: flexicurity in the land of Schumpeter

This paper evaluates the 2003 Austrian severance-pay reform, often advocated as a role model for structural reforms in countries plagued by inflexible labor markets and high unemployment. The reform replaced a system with tenure-based severance payments after a layoff (but not after a quit) by payments into pension accounts that accrue to workers after a layoff as well as after a…

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English / 01/06/2017

Gender differences in willingness to compete: the role of public observability

A recent literature emphasizes the importance of the gender gap in willingness to compete as a partial explanation for gender differences in labor market outcomes. However, whereas experiments investigating willingness to compete typically do so in anonymous environments, real world competitions often have a more public nature, which introduces potential social image concerns. If…

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English / 01/06/2017

Hunting unicorns? Experimental evidence on predatory pricing policies

We study the anticompetitive effects of predatory pricing and the efficacy of three policy responses. In a series of experiments where an incumbent and a potential entrant interact, we compare prices, market structures and welfare. Under a laissez-faire regime, the threat of post-entry price cuts discourages entry, and allows incumbents to charge monopoly prices. Current U.S. policy…

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English / 01/06/2017

Multiple testing of one-sided hypotheses: combining Bonferroni and the bootstrap

In many multiple testing problems, the individual null hypotheses (i) concern univariate parameters and (ii) are one-sided. In such problems, power gains can be obtained for bootstrap multiple testing procedures in scenarios where some of the parameters are 'deep in the null' by making certain adjustments to the null distribution under which to resample. In this paper, we…

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English / 01/06/2017

Mortality inequality in Canada and the U.S.: divergent or convergent trends?

Mortality is a crucial dimension of wellbeing and inequality in a population, and mortality trends have been at the core of public debates in many Western countries. In this paper, we provide the first analysis of mortality inequality in Canada and compare its development to trends in the U.S. We find strong reductions in mortality rates across both genders and at all ages, with the…

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English / 01/06/2017

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