Bildung ist der einzige Rohstoff,über den die Schweiz verfügt. Sie ist die notwendige Voraussetzung für den Erfolg der Wirtschaft und den Wohlstand unseres Landes.
So lautet das Credo von Politikern und Parteien von links bis rechts.
Effektiv sind es in immer stärkerem
Masse wissensbasierte Leistungen,
die nach der Wachstumsschwäche
der 1990er-Jahre und
den beiden Krisen im vergangenen
Jahrzehnt die Wirtschaft am
Standort Schweiz weiter gebracht
haben. Der wachsende Bedarf an
hochqualifiziertem Personal − sowohl
in der Wirtschaft wie auch in
Lehre und Forschung an den Hochschulen
– muss mit Bildungsausländern
gedeckt werden.
This article proposes a new class of rating scale models, which merges advantages and overcomes shortcomings of the traditional linear and ordered latent regression models. Both parametric and semi-parametric estimation is considered. The insights of an empirical application to satisfaction data are threefold. First, the methods are easily implementable in standard statistical software. Second, the non-linear model allows for flexible marginal effects, and predicted means respect the boundaries of the dependent variable. Third, average marginal effects are similar to ordinary least squares estimates.
Growth of per-capita income is associated with (i) significant shifts in the sectoral economic structure, (ii) systematic changes in relative prices and (iii) the Kaldor facts. Moreover, (iv) cross-sectional data shows systematic expenditure structure difference between rich and poor households. Ngai and Pissarides (2006) and Acemoglu and Guerrieri (2008) are consistent with observation (i)-(iii) but abstract form non-homotheticities of preferences. However, they cannot replicate the structural change between the U.S. goods and service sector quantitatively. This paper presents a growth model, which reconciles both forces of structural change - relative price and income effects - with balanced growth on the aggregate. The theory is simple and parsimonious and contains an analytical solution. The model can replicate shape and magnitude of the nonbalanced sectoral facts as well as the balanced nature of growth on the aggregate. In a structural estimation, the model’s functional form is exploited to obtain estimates for the relative importance of income and price effects as determinants of the structural change.
The official intention of the UNESCO World Heritage List is to protect the global heritage. However, the existing List is highly imbalanced according to countries and continents. Historical reasons, such as historical GDP, population, and number of years of high civilization, have a significant impact on being included on the List. In addition, economic and political factors unrelated to the value of heritage, such as rent seeking by bureaucrats and politicians, the size of the tourist sector, the importance of media, the degree of federalism, and membership in the UN Security Council, influence the composition of the List.
Numerous survey studies report that human resource managers curb wage inequality with the intent to avoid detrimental effects on workers’ morale. However, there exists little controlled empirical evidence demonstrating that horizontal social comparisons and wage inequality have adverse effects on worker behavior. In this paper, we present data from a laboratory experiment that studies the impact of wage inequality on participation and effort choices in team production. Overall, we do not find evidence that wage inequality has a significant impact on either participation or effort choices.
This note briefly summarizes the consequences of adding correlated individual differences to the best baseline model in the Games competition, I-SAW. I find evidence that the traits of an individual are correlated, but refining I-SAW to capture these correlations does not significantly improve the model’s accuracy when predicting average behavior.
During the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg on her maiden voyage. Two hours and 40 minutes later she sank, resulting in the loss of 1,501 lives—more than two-thirds of her 2,207 passengers and crew. This remains one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history and by far the most famous. For social scientists, evidence about how people behaved as the Titanic sunk offers a quasi-natural field experiment to explore behavior under extreme conditions of life and death. A common assumption is that in such situations, self-interested reactions will predominate and social cohesion is expected to disappear. However, empirical evidence on the extent to which people in the throes of a disaster react with self-regarding or with other-regarding behavior is scanty. The sinking of the Titanic posed a life-or-death situation for its passengers. The Titanic carried only 20 lifeboats, which could accommodate about half the people aboard, and deck officers exacerbated the shortage by launching lifeboats that were partially empty. Failure to secure a seat in a lifeboat virtually guaranteed death. We have collected individual-level data on the passengers and crew on the Titanic, which allow us to analyze some specific questions: Did physical strength (being male and in prime age) or social status (being a first- or second-class passenger) raise the survival chance? Was it favorable for survival to travel alone or in company? Does one's role or function (being a crew member or a passenger) affect the probability of survival? Do social norms, such as "Women and children first!" have any effect? Does nationality affect the chance of survival? We also explore whether the time from impact to sinking might matter by comparing the sinking of the Titanic over nearly three hours to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, which took only 18 minutes from when the torpedo hit the ship.
When moving figures are occluded and revealed piecemeal as they move across a narrow slit, observers may perceive them as integrated but distorted. They may also perceive much more of the figure as simultaneously visible than is actually presented at any moment. We obtained quantitative measures of both the perceived distortion and perceived simultaneity under free viewing conditions and related these phenomena to spontaneous pursuit eye movements, the retinal painting produced by this pursuit, and the occurrence of saccades. We found both shape compressions and expansions, depending on figure velocity. We also obtained quantitative evidence that observers perceived slices of the moving figures far wider than the slit through which they were presented. Eye-motion records and retinal stabilization revealed that spontaneous pursuit and the spatially extended images that could have been painted out by this pursuit played no role in the perceived global shape distortions and made only a small contribution to the perceived simultaneity. Therefore, under free viewing conditions, both the distortions and simultaneity of these "anorthoscopic" figure percepts must be the consequence of a postretinal process that integrates the figures over space and time independent of eye motions.
The visual system rapidly extracts information about objects from the cluttered natural environment. In 5 experiments, the authors quantified the influence of orientation and semantics on the classification speed of objects in natural scenes, particularly with regard to object-context interactions. Natural scene photographs were presented in an object-discrimination task and pattern masked with various scene-to-mask stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs). Full psychometric functions and reaction times (RTs) were measured. The authors found that (a) rotating the full scenes increased threshold SOA at intermediate rotation angles but not for inversion; (b) rotating object or context degraded classification performance in a similar manner; (c) semantically congruent contexts had negligible facilitatory effects on object classification compared with meaningless baseline contexts with a matching contrast structure, but incongruent contexts severely degraded performance; (d) any object-context incongruence (orientation or semantic) increased RTs at longer SOAs, indicating dependent processing of object and context; and (e) facilitatory effects of context emerged only when the context shortly preceded the object. The authors conclude that the effects of natural scene context on object classification are primarily inhibitory and discuss possible reasons.
The neural processes underlying empathy are a subject of intense interest within the social neurosciences. However, very little is known about how brain empathic responses are modulated by the affective link between individuals. We show here that empathic responses are modulated by learned preferences, a result consistent with economic models of social preferences. We engaged male and female volunteers in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas (fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices) towards fair players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge. We conclude that in men (at least) empathic responses are shaped by valuation of other people's social behaviour, such that they empathize with fair opponents while favouring the physical punishment of unfair opponents, a finding that echoes recent evidence for altruistic punishment.
