Publications des institutions partenaires
On the strategic value of risk management
This article examines how firms facing volatile input prices and holding some degree of market power in their product market link their risk management and their production or pricing strategies. This issue is relevant in many industries ranging from manufacturing to energy retailing, where firms rendered "risk averse" by financial frictions decide on and commit to their...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Asset Demand Based Tests of Expected Utility Maximization
In the neoclassical model of consumer behavior, considerable work has been done investigating when a consumer's demand behavior can be described as having been derived from utility maximization. However, most discussions are in a certainty world. We expand on prior analyses in an uncertainty setting by providing conditions under which contingent claim and asset demands will be...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Credit default swaps networks and systemic risk
Credit Default Swaps (CDS) spreads should reflect default risk of the underlying corporate debt. Actually, it has been recognized that CDS spread time series did not anticipate but only followed the increasing risk of default before the financial crisis. In principle, the network of correlations among CDS spread time series could at least display some form of structural change to be...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Funding decisions and entrepreneurial team diversity: A field study
This study provides experimental evidence, using a large sample of 2894 individuals recruited via business media websites, about the impact of demographic attributes within entrepreneurial teams on funding decisions by external capital providers. In previous work the role of diversity with regard to personal characteristics within entrepreneurial teams, such as education, gender and...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Direct evidence for attention-dependent influences of the frontal eye-fields on feature-responsive visual cortex
Voluntary selective attention can prioritize different features in a visual scene. The frontal eye-fields (FEF) are one potential source of such feature-specific top-down signals, but causal evidence for influences on visual cortex (as was shown for "spatial" attention) has remained elusive. Here, we show that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) applied to right FEF...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Technology cycles in dynamic R&D networks
In this paper we study the coevolutionary dynamics of knowledge creation, diffusion and the formation of R&D collaboration networks. Differently to previous works, knowledge is not treated as an abstract scalar variable but represented by a portfolio of ideas that changes over time through innovations and knowledge spillovers between collaborating firms. The collaborations...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
The two faces of independence: betweenness and homotheticity
Many studies document failures of expected utility’s key assumption, the independence axiom. Here, we show that independence can be decomposed into two distinct axioms – betweenness and homotheticity – and that these two axioms are necessary and sufficient for independence. Thus, independence can fail because homotheticity, betweenness, or both are violated. Most research has...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Interactions between dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex underlie context-dependent stimulus valuation in goal-directed choice
External circumstances and internal bodily states often change and require organisms to flexibly adapt valuation processes to select the optimal action in a given context. Here, we investigate the neurobiology of context-dependent valuation in 22 human subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects made binary choices between visual stimuli with three attributes (...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Propaganda and conflict: evidence from the Rwandan genocide
This article investigates the role of mass media in times of conflict and state-sponsored mass violence against civilians. We use a unique village-level data set from the Rwandan genocide to estimate the impact of a popular radio station that encouraged violence against the Tutsi minority population. The results show that the broadcasts had a significant effect on participation in...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Socially responsible investing and stock performance: New empirical evidence for the US and European stock markets
This paper empirically examines the theoretically ambivalent relationship between socially responsible investing (SRI) and stock performance. It contributes to the existing literature by considering both the US and the entire European stock markets and by using consistent world-wide corporate sustainability performance data. Our portfolio analysis from 1998 to 2009 is based on the...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/11/2014
Does sports activity improve health? Representative evidence using proximity to sports facilities as an instrument
Using representative and geocoded data from the Swiss Household Panel and the Swiss Business Census, we estimate the effect of sports activity on health care utilization and health. Because sports activity is likely correlated with unobserved determinants of health care utilization and health, we use the number of sports facilities within 6 miles of the individual’s residence as an...
Institution partenaire
English / 15/10/2014
Matched-filter acquisition for BOLD fMRI
We introduce matched-filter fMRI, which improves BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) sensitivity by variable-density image acquisition tailored to subsequent image smoothing. Image smoothing is an established post-processing technique used in the vast majority of fMRI studies. Here we show that the signal-to-noise ratio of the resulting smoothed data can be substantially increased by...
Institution partenaire
English / 15/10/2014
Wieso kapitalgedeckte Rentensysteme nicht immer die besten sind
Institution partenaire
Deutsch / 15/10/2014
Tiger moms and helicopter parents: The economics of parenting style
Since time immemorial, parents have struggled with the question of how best to raise their children. This column argues that the choice of parenting style is driven by incentives. Parents weigh the expected costs and benefits of implementing a certain parenting style. The popularity of the authoritarian style is declining because the economic returns to the independence of children...
Institution partenaire
English / 11/10/2014
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