infonet-economy

The nexus between ownership and competition in the banking sector is a major concern to policymakers around the world but one that is rarely comprehensively examined. For 131 countries and 13 years we match bank ownership with over 50,000 bank-year estimates of individual bank market power. We find that ownership does not explain market power at the individual bank level. However, at...

We study whether employment history can provide information about a worker’s non-cognitive skills - in particular, about “work attitude,” or the ability to work well and cooperatively with others. We conjecture that, holding all else equal, a worker’s frequent job changes can indicate poorer work attitude, and that this information is transmitted in labor markets through employment...

This paper studies the impact of the presence of human subjects in the role of a seller on bidding in experimental second-price auctions. Overbidding is a robust finding in second- price auctions, and spite among bidders has been advanced as an explanation. If spite extends to the seller, then the absence of human sellers who receive the auction revenue may bias upwards the bidding...

Gift-giving customs are ubiquitous in social, political, and business life. Legal regulation and industry guidelines for gifts are often based on the assumption that large gifts have the potential to influence behavior and create confl of interest, but small gifts do not. However, scientific evidence on the impact of small gifts on business relationships is scarce. We conducted a...

We test the impact of a peer group savings program on precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microcredit clients. The first experiment finds that the Peer Group Treatment, which combines public goal setting, monitoring in the group, and non-financial rewards, increases savings in a new savings account significantly. The number of deposits grows 3....

Volkswirtschafts-Professor Ernst Fehr über den Ruf der Forschung in Zürich, die Schweizer als geborene Ökonomen und die Nationalbank im Labor.

Der Verhaltensökonom hat die Wissenschaften bereits revolutioniert. Nun fordert Ernst Fehr auch von Bankmanagern und Politikern ein Umdenken.

Optimal rank-order tournaments have traditionally been studied using a first-order approach. The present analysis relies instead on the construction of an "upper envelope" over all incentive compatibility conditions. lt turns out that the first-order approach is not innocuous. For example, in contrast to the traditional understanding, tournaments may be dominated by piece...