infonet-economy

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went bankrupt, many lenders were exposed. In the end, none of them actually lost money....

Ernst Fehr baut die Wirtschaftsfakultät der Universität Zürich kräftig aus – auf rund 30 Professoren

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...

Der Wettlauf der Eitelkeiten kann zu einer höheren kollektiven Wirtschaftsleistung führen. Er kann die Menschen aber auch unglücklich machen und zu fahrlässigem Konsum verleiten.

We study the bilateral trade problem put forward by Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) under the assumption that agents are loss-averse, using the model developed by Kőszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). We show that the endowment effect increases the sellers information rent, and that the attachment effect reduces the buyer’s information rent. Further, depending on the distribution of types...

China’s emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences. These impacts are most visible in the...

Ein Gespräch mit Josef Falkinger über Ungleichheit, Teilhabe und Gerechtigkeit, die gesellschaftliche Bedeutung eines gemeinsamen Fortschrittsprojekts und ökonomische Macht.