Publications des institutions partenaires
The Swiss franc's honeymoon
Starting from the stylized fact that the Swiss franc is a safe haven currency, this paper focuses on the determinants of the Swiss franc during the lower bound regime from September 2011 to January 2015. We describe the Swiss franc as a function of global market risk fundamentals and find that the macroeconomic model outlined by Krugman (1991) describes the EUR/CHF exchange rate well…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Green taxes in a post-Paris world: are millions of nays inevitable?
Turning the Paris Agreement's greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments. We address the question of the acceptability of cost-effective climate policy in a real-voting setting. First, we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes, rejected in Switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people. Energy taxes were…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
An econometric model of healthcare demand with nonlinear pricing
From 2004 to 2012, the German social health insurance levied a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. We develop a new model for estimating the effect of such a co-payment on the individual number of visits per quarter. The model combines a one-time increase in the otherwise constant hazard rate determining the timing of doctor visits with a difference-in-…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Temporal trends, regional variation and socio-economic differences in height, BMI and body proportions among German conscripts, 1956-2010
OBJECTIVE We analyse temporal trends and regional variation among the most recent available anthropometric data from German conscription in the years 2008-2010 and their historical contextualization since 1956. Design/setting/subjects The overall sample included German conscripts (N 13 857 313) from 1956 to 2010. RESULTS German conscripts changed from growing in height to growing…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
A dynamic hurdle model for zero-inflated count data
Excess zeros are encountered in many empirical count data applications. We provide a new explanation of extra zeros, related to the underlying stochastic process that generates events. The process has two rates, a lower rate until the first event, and a higher one thereafter. We derive the corresponding distribution of the number of events during a fixed period and extend it to…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Econometric analysis of ratings : with an application to health and wellbeing
We propose a new non-linear regression model for rating dependent variables. The rating scale model accounts for the upper and lower bounds of ratings. Parametric and semi-parametric estimation is discussed. An application investigates the relationship between stated health satisfaction and physical and mental health scores derived from self-reports of various health impairments,…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Higher heart rate variability is associated with vmPFC activity and increased resistance to temptation in dietary self-control challenges
Higher levels of self-control in decision making have been linked to better psychosocial and physical health. A similar link to health outcomes has been reported for heart rate variability (HRV), a marker of physiological flexibility. Here, we sought to link these two, largely separate, research domains by testing the hypothesis that greater HRV would be associated with better…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Too old to work, too young to retire?
We study whether employment prospects of old and young workers differ after a plant closure. Using Austrian administrative data and a combination of exact matching and fixed effects, we show that old and young workers face similarly large displacement costs in terms of employment in the long-run, but old workers lose considerably more initially and gain later. Effects on wages of…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Testosterone administration does not affect men's rejections of low ultimatum game offers or aggressive mood
Correlative evidence suggests that testosterone promotes dominance and aggression. However, causal evidence is scarce and offers mixed results. To investigate this relationship, we administered testosterone for 48h to 41 healthy young adult men in a within-subjects, double-blind placebo-controlled balanced crossover design. Subjects played the role of responders in an ultimatum game…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Monetary, food, and social rewards induce similar pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer effects
Multiple types of reward, such as money, food or social approval, are capable of driving behavior. However, most previous investigations have only focused on one of these reward classes in isolation, as such it is not clear whether different reward classes have a unique influence on instrumental responding or whether the subjective value of the reward, rather than the reward type per…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Four essays on the economics of communication with strategic and social motives
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Contributions to the current debates on the financial markets and on environmental policy in China
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
The risk of female genital cutting in Europe: Comparing immigrant attitudes toward uncut girls with attitudes in a practicing country
Worldwide, an estimated 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting. Female genital cutting is defined as an intentional injury to the female genitalia without medical justification. The practice occurs in at least 29 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In addition, globalization and migration have brought immigrants from countries where…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Weighted least squares and adaptive least squares: further empirical evidence
This paper compares ordinary least squares (OLS), weighted least squares (WLS), and adaptive least squares (ALS) by means of a Monte Carlo study and an application to two empirical data sets. Overall, ALS emerges as the winner: It achieves most or even all of the efficiency gains of WLS over OLS when WLS outperforms OLS, but it only has very limited downside risk compared to OLS when…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Multi-unit price promotions and their impact on purchase decisions and sales
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Impact evaluation methods in public economics
Recent years have seen a large expansion in the use of rigorous impact evaluation techniques. Increasingly, public administrations are collaborating with academic economists and other quantitative social scientists to apply such rigorous methods to the study of public finance. These developments allow for more reliable measurements of the effects of different policy options on the…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Working-class strength by institutional design? Unionization, partisan politics and unemployment insurance systems, 1870-2010
Many studies have found that countries with union-administered unemployment insurance have higher rates of unionization than countries with state-administered unemployment insurance. With data going further back in history, this paper demonstrates that the introduction of so-called “Ghent systems” had no effect on unionization rates. We argue that the Ghent effect identified by the…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
How corporatist institutions shape the access of citizen groups to policy makers: Evidence from Denmark and Switzerland
Traditional corporatist groups such as business groups and unions still play an important role in many countries, and the rumors exaggerates the decline of corporatist structures. Nevertheless citizen groups have grown in number and political importance. We show that Danish and Swiss citizen groups have gained better access to the administrative and the parliamentary venues in the…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
Cautiousness Caps Curiosity: The Influence of Risk on Attitude towards Product Subscription Models
Product subscription models have grown in popularity among retailers and consumers. We show that risk perception plays a central role in consumers’ evaluation of product subscriptions. Contrasting with predefined subscriptions, where contents are known to consumers prior to delivery, surprise subscriptions, where contents are unknown to consumers prior to delivery, carry an inherent…
Institution partenaire
English / 01/01/2017
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