Publications des institutions partenaires
161 - 180 of 2421
Government distortion in independently owned media: evidence from U.S. Cold War news coverage of human rights
This study provides evidence of government distortion of news coverage among independently owned media outlets in a democratic regime. It uses data from 1946 to 2010 and documents that U.S. news coverage of human rights abuses committed by foreign governments was associated with membership on the United Nations Security Council and the degree of political alliance with the United…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2017
Altered reward anticipation: Potential explanation for weight gain in schizophrenia?
Obesity and weight gain are severe complications of mental illness, especially schizophrenia. They result from changes in lifestyle and nutrition, side effects of medication and other, less well-understood factors. Recent studies suggest that obesity and weight gain are linked to psychopathology. Specifically, severe psychopathology is associated with greater weight dysregulation,…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2017
"Mafia Inc.": when godfathers become entrepreneurs
We study the investment of criminal organizations in the legal economy. We focus on Italy, a country historically plagued by a conspicuous presence of mafia-type organizations. By using the exogenous credit contraction imposed by the 2007 financial crisis we highlight how the consequences for newly established enterprises have been less severe in areas with organized crime. Although…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2017
The neural circuitry of emotion-induced distortions of trust
Aversive emotions are likely to be a key source of irrational human decision-making but still little is known about the underlying neural circuitry. Here, we show that aversive emotions distort trust decisions and cause significant changes in the associated neural circuitry. They reduce trust and suppress trust-specific activity in left temporoparietal junction (TPJ). In addition,…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2017
Understanding peer effects: on the nature, estimation, and channels of peer effects
This paper estimates peer effects in a university context where students are randomly assigned to sections. While students benefit from better peers on average, low-achieving students are harmed by high-achieving peers. Analyzing students’ course evaluations suggests that peer effects are driven by improved group interaction rather than adjustments in teachers’ behavior or students’…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2017
Adaptive value normalization in the prefrontal cortex is reduced by memory load
Adaptation facilitates neural representation of a wide range of diverse inputs, including reward values. Adaptive value coding typically relies on contextual information either obtained from the environment or retrieved from and maintained in memory. However, it is unknown whether having to retrieve and maintain context information modulates the brain’s capacity for value adaptation…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2017
Competition in agricultural markets: an experimental approach
This paper develops an experimental approach to measure competition among intermediaries in agricultural markets, based on the random allocation of subsidies to traders. We show that, in individual-level randomizations with competitive spillovers, treatment-control differences in prices can inform an intuitive test of the degree of differentiation among firms. In the context of the…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/04/2017
Mindfulness,a way to metamorphose work into a self-fulfillment process: : an anthropological approach
Institution partenaire
English / 16/03/2017
Optimal estimation of a large-dimensional covariance matrix under Stein’s loss
This paper introduces a new method for deriving covariance matrix estimators that are decision-theoretically optimal within a class of nonlinear shrinkage estimators. The key is to employ large-dimensional asymptotics: the matrix dimension and the sample size go to infinity together, with their ratio converging to a finite, nonzero limit. As the main focus, we apply this method to…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Resurrecting weighted least squares
This paper shows how asymptotically valid inference in regression models based on the weighted least squares (WLS) estimator can be obtained even when the model for reweighting the data is misspecified. Like the ordinary least squares estimator, the WLS estimator can be accompanied by heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC) standard errors without knowledge of the functional form of…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Do professional norms in the banking industry favor risk-taking?
In recent years, the banking industry has witnessed several cases of excessive risk-taking that frequently have been attributed to problematic professional norms. We conduct experiments with employees from several banks in which we manipulate the saliency of their professional identity and subsequently measure their risk aversion in a real stakes investment task. If bank employees…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
The lottery contest is a best-response potential game
It is shown that the n-player lottery contest admits a best-response potential (Voorneveld, 2000, Economics Letters). This is true also when the contest technology reflects the possibility of a draw. The result implies, in particular, the existence of a non-trivial two-player zero-sum game that is best-response equivalent to a game with identical payoff functions.
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Revenue ranking of optimally biased contests: the case of two players
It is shown that the equilibrium in the asymmetric Tullock contest is unique for parameter values r ≤ 2. This allows proving a revenue ranking result saying that a revenue-maximizing designer capable of biasing the contest always prefers a contest technology with higher accuracy.
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Smoking behaviour in Germany: evidence from the SOEP
As in most OECD countries, smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption have been decreasing in Germany since the early 2000s. This paper analyses whether smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption, as well as their development over time, differ between socio-economic subgroups. Identifying these differences provides insights into the effect of policy interventions on German…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Accounting for the new gains from trade liberalization
We measure the "new" gains from trade reaped by Canada as a result of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA). We think of the "new" gains from trade of a country as all welfare effects pertaining to changes in the set of firms serving that country as emphasized in the so-called "new" trade literature. To this end, we first develop an exact…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
The role of gender in employment polarization
We document that U.S. employment polarization in the 1980-2008 period is largely generated by women. Female employment shares increase both at the bottom and at the top of the skill distribution, generating the typical U-shape polarization graph, while male employment shares decrease in a more similar fashion along the whole skill distribution. We show that a canonical model of skill…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Poorly measured confounders are more useful on the left than on the right
Researchers frequently test identifying assumptions in regression based research designs (which include instrumental variables or difference-in-differences models) by adding additional control variables on the right hand side of the regression. If such additions do not affect the coefficient of interest (much) a study is presumed to be reliable. We caution that such invariance may…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Decision-making in multiple sclerosis: the role of aversion to ambiguity for therapeutic inertia among neurologists (DIScUTIR MS)
Objectives: Limited information is available on physician-related factors influencing therapeutic inertia (TI) in multiple sclerosis (MS). Our aim was to evaluate whether physicians’ risk preferences are associated with TI in MS care, by applying concepts from behavioral economics.
Design: In this cross-sectional study, participants answered questions regarding the management…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Analysis of the precision of variable flip angle T1 mapping with emphasis on the noise propagated from RF transmit field maps
In magnetic resonance imaging, precise measurements of longitudinal relaxation time (T1) is crucial to acquire useful information that is applicable to numerous clinical and neuroscience applications. In this work, we investigated the precision of T1 relaxation time as measured using the variable flip angle method with emphasis on the noise propagated from radiofrequency transmit…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
Maintaining efficiency while integrating entrants from lower performing groups: an experimental study
Efficiently growing a group often requires integrating individuals from lower performing entities. We explore the effectiveness of policies intended to facilitate such integration, using an experiment that models production as a coordination game. We create an efficient group and an inefficient one. We then allow individuals to move into the efficient group under different mechanisms…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/03/2017
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