Publications des institutions partenaires
Growing and slowing down like China
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2017
Creating an efficient culture of cooperation
Throughout human history, informal sanctions by peers were ubiquitous and played a key role in the enforcement of social norms and the provision of public goods. However, a considerable body of evidence suggests that informal peer sanctions cause large collateral damage and efficiency costs. This raises the question whether peer sanctioning systems exist that avoid these costs and...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2017
Culture, work attitudes, and job search: evidence from the Swiss language border
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2017
Delegating performance evaluation
We study optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents when performance evaluation is delegated to a reviewer. The reviewer may be biased in favor of the agents, but the degree of the bias is unknown to the principal. We show that a contest, which is a contract in which the principal determines a set of prizes to be allocated to the agents, is optimal. By using a contest, the...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2017
Trading down and the business cycle
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2017
The Spanish or the German apartment? Study abroad and the acquisition of permanent skills
In Europe, more than 250,0 0 0 university students spend one or two semesters abroad every year. This study explores whether a short time abroad contributes to the acquisition of foreign language proficiency. We use a newly available dataset about almost the totality of Italian graduates and two alternative in- struments to address the endogeneity of studying abroad. Both instruments...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2017
"US-Forscher kommen lieber nach Zürich"
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.
Institution partenaire
Deutsch / 12/09/2017
"Ökonomen müssen nicht populär sein"
Der Zürcher Starökonom Ernst Fehr über die Kritik an den Wirtschaftswissenschaften und die Lehren aus der jüngsten Finanzkrise.
Institution partenaire
Deutsch / 08/09/2017
Contests with small noise and the robustness of the all-pay auction
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2017
The limits to moral erosion in markets: social norms and the replacement excuse
This paper studies the impact of a key feature of competitive markets on moral behavior: the possibility that a competitor will step in and conclude the deal if a conscientious market actor forgoes a profitable business opportunity for ethical reasons. We study experimentally whether people employ the argument "if I don’t do it, someone else will" to justify taking a...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2017
Direct Nonlinear Shrinkage Estimation of Large-Dimensional Covariance Matrices
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2017
Signaling to experts
We study competitive equilibrium in a signaling economy with heterogeneously informed buyers. In terms of the classic Spence (1973) model of job market signaling, firms have access to direct but imperfect information about worker types, in addition to observing their education. Firms can be ranked according to the quality of their information, i.e. their expertise. In equilibrium,...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2017
Gender bias in teaching evaluations
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2017
Insufficient sleep: Enhanced risk-seeking relates to low local sleep intensity
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2017
Does expanding regional train service reduce air pollution?
We assess how regional rail service affects air pollution in Germany, where rail service is procured in auctions or negotiations. We argue that the procurement mode is plausibly exogenous, and show that auctions deliver stronger rail service growth than negotiations. Instrumenting rail service growth with procurement mode, we find that increasing rail service by 10% reduces carbon...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2017
Students are almost as effective as professors in university teaching
Many universities around the world rely on student instructors—current bachelor’s and master’s degree students—for tutorial teaching, yet we know nothing about their effectiveness. In a setting with random assignment of instructors to students, we show that student instructors are almost as effective as senior instructors at improving their students’ short- and longer-run academic...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2017
Der grosse Krypto-Quatsch
Derzeit ist nicht erkennbar, dass es eine klare Rolle für Kryptowährungen gibt, die für legitime Zwecke nicht ebenso gut durch traditionelle Währungen erfüllt werden könnte. Ein Kommentar von Joachim Voth.
Institution partenaire
Deutsch / 21/08/2017
Der Aufstieg der Superstar-Firmen
Der Erfolg von Unternehmen wie Microsoft und Amazon hat zur Marktdominanz einzelner Anbieter geführt und deren Besitzer immens reich gemacht. Ein Kommentar von David Dorn.
Institution partenaire
Deutsch / 14/08/2017
The determinants of food choice
Health nudge interventions to steer people into healthier lifestyles are increasingly applied by governments worldwide, and it is natural to look to such approaches to improve health by altering what people choose to eat. However, to produce policy recommendations that are likely to be effective, we need to be able to make valid predictions about the consequences of proposed...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/08/2017
Corruption and cooperation
Corruption is a widespread phenomenon. Nevertheless, causal evidence on the effects of corruption is still lacking. In this paper, we assess whether and how corruption affects cooperation using a public good game experiment. Overall, contributions to the public good are reduced by 30% when participants have the possibility to bribe the punishment authority. Two concurrent channels...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/08/2017
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