Publications des institutions partenaires
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
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
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/08/2017
The neurobiology of trust and cooperation: the important role of emotions
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
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)...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/07/2017
Insurance and its continued benefits to the economy and society
Institution partenaire
English / 12/06/2017
Students’ perception of the flipped classroom: teaching consumer behavior and market research classes in two swiss universities
Marketing instructors have traditionally sought to use experiential and active learning methods in their teaching. The flipped classroom is a learner-centered innovative pedagogical approach that moves the delivery of class material outside the classroom to focus on collaborative activities during class sessions. This qualitative exploratory research aims at understanding how...
Institution partenaire
English / 09/06/2017
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...
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
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-...
Institution partenaire
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
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