infonet-economy

Corporatism is often seen as the way Swiss stakeholders in business and politics handle industrial challenges in a reasonable and flexible way. The following publication argues, however, that the emergence of corporatist structures in the Swiss watch industry has often encouraged rent-seeking and collusion at the expense of the creation of new markets through innovation. This legacy…

Die von den grössten amerikanischen Indexfonds gesammelten Mittel sind enorm, ihr Einfluss dementsprechend. Es entsteht die Befürchtung, dass der Wettbewerb in manchen Sektoren darunter leidet.

We study the effects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transformation. To guide empirical work, we present a simple model where the effect of agricultural productivity on industrial development depends on the factor bias of technical change. We test the predictions of the model by studying the introduction of genetically engineered soybean seeds in Brazil…

Visual perception is strongly shaped by expectations, but it is poorly understood how such perceptual expectations are learned in our dynamic sensory environment. Here, we applied a Bayesian framework to investigate whether perceptual expectations are continuously updated from different aspects of ongoing experience. In two experiments, human observers performed an associative…

Billige Importe aus China haben in den USA zu einem gewaltigen Verlust an Jobs in der Industrie geführt, sagt der Zürcher Ökonom David Dorn. Die Betroffenen wählten häufig weit rechts oder weit links.

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers and a decreasing share of transactions in which banks are acquired by other banks. Other…

Der technische Fortschritt vernichtet Arbeitsplätze und schafft neue. Über die Entwicklung der Arbeitswelt sprachen Roger Nickl und Thomas Gull mit der Historikerin Brigitta Bernet und dem Ökonomen David Dorn.

Behavioral robustness is essential in mechanism design. Existing papers focus on robustness as captured by dominant strategies. This paper studies the novel concept of externality-robustness, which addresses players' motives to affect other players' monetary payoffs. One example is externalities due to spite, which has been used to explain overbidding in second-price…

Many recent studies point to increasing inequality in mortality in the United States over the past 20 years. These studies often use mortality rates in middle and old age. We used poverty level rankings of groups of U.S. counties as a basis for analyzing inequality in mortality for all age groups in 1990, 2000, and 2010. Consistent with previous studies, we found increasing…