infonet-economy

In der Neuroökonomie werden bisweilen auch Gedanken manipuliert. Das weckt Abwehrreflexe. Der Neuroökonom Christian Ruff sieht aber wenig Missbrauchspotenzial.

We show that a one-off incentive to bias advice has persistent effects. In an experiment, advisers were paid a bonus to recommend a lottery which only risk-seeking individuals should choose to a less informed client. Afterwards, they had to choose for themselves and make a second recommendation to another client, without any bonus. These advisers choose the risky lottery and...

This article is based on the presidential address delivered at the EEA Annual Congress 2016. It discusses China’s institutional and economic transformation through the lens of the model of growth and convergence developed in Acemoglu, Aghion, and Zilibotti (JEEA 2006), which emphasizes the dichotomy between investment- and innovation-led growth. The economic reforms introduced in the...

Unemployment varies across space and in time. Can attitudes toward work explain some of these differences? We study job search durations along the Swiss language border, sharply separating Romance language speakers from German speakers. According to surveys and voting results, the language border separates two social groups with different cultural background and attitudes toward work...

We document two facts. First, during the Great Recession, consumers traded down in the quality of the goods and services they consumed. Second, the production of low-quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high-quality goods. When households traded down, labor demand fell, increasing the severity of the recession. We find that the trading-down phenomenon accounts for a...

Die Uni Zürich ist die forschungsstärkste VWL-Hochschule im deutschsprachigen Raum und peilt nun die Weltspitze an. Direktor Rainer Winkelmann über die Zukunft und die Probleme der Zunft.

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the proximity to the all-pay auction. This allows, in particular, to provide simple conditions...

This paper introduces a nonlinear shrinkage estimator of the covariance matrix that does not require recovering the population eigenvalues first. We estimate the sample spectral density and its Hilbert transform directly by smoothing the sample eigenvalues with a variable-bandwidth kernel. Relative to numerically inverting the so-called QuEST function, the main advantages of direct...

This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students' grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor's gender, we find that women...