Publications des institutions partenaires
Aggregate fluctuations in adaptive production networks
We study production networks where firms’ products can be described by a set of input and output characteristics, and links are formed only if the output characteristics of a seller match the input characteristics of a customer. We introduce a fully endogenous network formation model with monopolistically competitive firms, in which firms exit due to exogenous shocks, or the...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/12/2016
Time vs. state in insurance: experimental evidence from contract farming in Kenya
The gains from insurance arise from the transfer of income across states. Yet, by requiring that the premium be paid upfront, standard insurance products also transfer income across time. We show that this intertemporal transfer can help explain low insurance demand, especially among the poor, and in a randomized control trial in Kenya we test a crop insurance product which removes...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/12/2016
The economics of peace: can “Swiss” institutions do the job?
In the 5th edition of the UBS Center Public Paper Series, Dominic Rohner shows how conflict-torn countries can escape the vicious cycle of war and destruction. Much of the economics and political science literature on wars and conflict has focused on things that are hard for policymakers to change (natural resources, ethnic composition, and weather shocks). While this paper also...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/12/2016
The slippery slope of dishonesty
Recent experiments suggest that dishonesty can escalate from small levels to ever-larger ones along a 'slippery slope'. Activity in bilateral amygdala tracks this gradual adaptation to repeated acts of self-serving dishonesty.
Institution partenaire
English / 01/12/2016
Investigating the group-level impact of advanced dual-echo fMRI combinations
Multi-echo fMRI data acquisition has been widely investigated and suggested to optimize sensitivity for detecting the BOLD signal. Several methods have also been proposed for the combination of data with different echo times. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether these advanced echo combination methods provide advantages over the simple averaging of echoes when...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/12/2016
Brain network mechanisms underlying motor enhancement by transcranial entrainment of gamma oscillations
Gamma and beta oscillations are routinely observed in motor-related brain circuits during movement preparation and execution. Entrainment of gamma or beta oscillations via transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) over primary motor cortex (M1) has opposite effects on motor performance, suggesting a causal role of these brain rhythms for motor control. However, it is...
Institution partenaire
English / 23/11/2016
Limited consumer attention in international trade
This paper introduces a model of limited consumer attention into an otherwise standard new trade theory model with love-of-variety preferences and heterogeneous firms. In this setting, we show that international integration needs not be welfare enhancing if the consumers' capacity to gather and process information is limited. Rather, it intensifies competition for scarce...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2016
Distributional comparative statics with heterogeneous agents
We propose a formal way to systematically study the differential effects of exogenous shocks in economic models with heterogeneous agents. Our setting applies to models that can be rephrased as "competition for market shares" in a broad sense. We show that even in presence of any number of arbitrarily heterogeneous agents, a single recursion relation characterizes the...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2016
Health and skill formation in early childhood
This paper analyzes the developmental origins and the evolution of health, cognitive, and socio-emotional skills during early childhood, from age 0 to 5. We explicitly model the dynamic interactions of health with the child’s behavior and cognitive skills, as well as the role of parental investment. A dynamic factor model corrects for the presence of measurement error in the proxy...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2016
Leverage and beliefs: personal experience and risk-taking in margin lending
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....
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2016
Brain stimulation reveals crucial role of overcoming self-centeredness in self-control
Neurobiological models of self-control predominantly focus on the role of prefrontal brain mechanisms involved in emotion regulation and impulse control. We provide evidence for an entirely different neural mechanism that promotes self-control by overcoming bias for the present self, a mechanism previously thought to be mainly important for interpersonal decision-making. In two...
Institution partenaire
English / 05/10/2016
The benefits of intervention: birth weights in Basle 1912-1920
To assess the impact of interventions on well-being during war time, we analyze data from the birth records at the university maternity hospital of Basle in the period 1912-1920. Birth weight of children from medium SEP families decreased during the crisis years 1918 and 1919, but not for low and high SEP families. A potential explanation is access to food: while high SEP families...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2016
Changing cultural attitudes towards female genital cutting
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2016
The order of knowledge and robust action. how to deal with economic uncertainty?
Uncertainty in economics is generated by “nature” but also by the model we use to “produce the future”. The production of the future comprises besides the allocation of resources on different instruments (technologies, financial products) also the design of the instruments. Specialization and diversification considerations point to the advantages of targeting instruments to a rich...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2016
Macroeconomic risk in exchange rates: three empirical essays
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2016
Essays in behavioral economics: experimental studies on morals and cooperation
Institution partenaire
English / 01/10/2016
Partial adaptation of obtained and observed value signals preserves information about gains and losses
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 28/09/2016
Bilateral trade with loss-averse agents
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2016
Designing dynamic research contests
This paper considers the optimal design of dynamic research contests when the buyer can set time-dependent prizes. We derive the buyer-optimal contest and show that it entails an increasing prize schedule. Remarkably, this allows the buyer to implement a global stopping rule. In particular, the optimal contest attains the first-best. More generally, we show that global stopping rules...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2016
The China shock: learning from labor market adjustment to large changes in trade
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...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/09/2016
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