infonet-economy

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…

The practice of lobbying in the interest of economic or social groups plays an important role in the policy making process of most economies. We carry out a multi-level network analysis of the relations among lobbying organizations in the EU transparency register, focusing on the domain of finance and climate. We find that the network centrality of organizations has no simple…

We propose a general particle filtering and learning framework for mixed-frequency state-space models. Our mixed-frequency particle methods use a smoother so as to draw the Bayesian in- ference from low-frequency observations. Our forward smoother is simple and efficient, and the sample path degeneracy is negligible with a small lag size. The backward smoother mitigates the sample…

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…

As of this writing in June 2016, the markets are predicting Venezuela to be on the brink of default. On June 1, 2016, the 6 month CDS contract traded at about 7000bps which translates into a likelihood of default of over 90%. Our interest in the Venezuelan crisis is that its outstanding sovereign bonds have a unique set of contractual features that, in combination with its near-…

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…

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…

Eine gesunde Schwangerschaft und frühkindliche Interventionen verringern ökonomische Ungleichheit. Wie, erklärt der Ökonom Hannes Schwandt, der von Princeton an die Uni Zürich gewechselt ist.