This paper studies whether people can avoid punishment by remaining willfully ignorant about possible negative consequences of their actions for others. We employ a laboratory experiment, using modified dictator games in which a dictator can remain willfully ignorant about the payoff consequences of his decision for a receiver. A third party can punish the dictator after observing the dictator’s decision and the resulting payoffs. On the one hand, willfully ignorant dictators are punished less if their actions lead to unfair outcomes than dictators who reveal the consequences before implementing the same outcome. On the other hand, willfully ignorant dictators are punished more than revealing dictators if their actions do not lead to unfair outcomes. We conclude that willful ignorance can circumvent blame when unfair outcomes result, but that the act of remaining willfully ignorant is itself punished, regardless of the outcome.
Sectoral data features (i) changing relative expenditures of different sectors, (ii) non-constancy in relative prices and (iii) long-run trends in relative TFP growth rates across sectors. We provide a tractable theory of industry directed technical change, which is able to reconcile these findings. In doing so, this paper emphasizes the importance of directed technical change, nonhomotheticity of preferences and structural change as a long-run phenomenon. Using the input-output tables of the U.S., our theory helps us to reconstruct how structural change in terms of final consumption affects the market size of industry value-added. Arguing that the structural change across broad categories of final consumption is exogenous from the perspective of an individual firm, this gives us an instrument for the industrial market size (at the valueadded level). We then empirically test for the market size effect of induced innovation. Our findings suggest that a 1 percent increase in an industry’s market size (relative to GDP) leads to an increase in the TFP growth rate of about 0.3 percentage points over five years.
Wirtschaftsprofessor Fabrizio Zilibotti äussert sich im Interview mit «Finanz und Wirtschaft» dazu, wie Italien die Eurozone gefährdet und wo das Land typisch ist für ihre Probleme.
We examine the distribution of income across Swiss primary school teachers at the end of the 19th century. To assess the income differences we use a detailed data set on income of 14000 Swiss primary school teachers in 1881 and 1894/95. In addition, we have annually aggregated test scores from pedagogical examinations at recruitment, to test for the impact of inequality on conscripts’ performance. Our results show that between-group inequality amounts to about 30 per cent of total income inequality, and that teachers’ income inequality does not play a role in explaining differences in the performance of conscripts in the pedagogical examinations.
Der Wettbewerb zwischen Firmen und Produkten ist im Zuge der Globalisierung und Internationalisierung immer mehr zum Wettbewerb der Standorte geworden. Massgebend für Beschäftigung und Wohlstand ist die internationale Wettbewerbsfähigkeit, also die Attraktivität des Standortes für wertschöpfungsstarke Aktivitäten im Rahmen globaler Wertschöpfungsketten. Eine Volkswirtschaft ist dann wettbewerbsfähig, wenn sie ihrer Bevölkerung dauerhaft interessante Arbeit bei gutem Einkommen zu geben vermag. Im Falle einer hochentwickelten Volkswirtschaft wie der Schweiz mit einem hohen Einkommensniveau und einer harten Währung kann dies im Wesentlichen nur über einen Qualitäts- und Neuerungswettbewerb erreicht werden – also über Innovation.
We introduce a general testing procedure inmodels with possible identification failure that has exactasymptotic rejection probability under the null hypothesis. The procedure iswidely applicable and in this paper we apply it to tests of arbitrary linear parameter hypotheses as well as to tests of overidentification in time series models given by unconditional moment conditions. The main idea is to subsample classical tests, like for example theWald or the J test.More precisely, instead of using critical values based on asymptotic theory,we compute data-dependent critical values based on the subsampling technique.
We show that under full identification the resulting tests are consistent against fixed alternatives and that they have exact asymptotic rejection probabilities under the null hypothesis independent of identification failure. Furthermore, the subsampling tests of parameter hypotheses are shown to have the same local power as the original tests under full identification. An algorithm is provided that automates the block size choice needed to implement the subsampling testing procedure. A Monte Carlo study shows that the tests have reasonable size properties and often outperform other robust tests in terms of power.
This paper introduces a new method for deriving covariance matrix estimators that are decision-theoretically optimal within a class of nonlinear shrinkage estimators. The key is to employ large-dimensional asymptotics: the matrix dimension and the sample size go to infinity together, with their ratio converging to a finite, nonzero limit. As the main focus, we apply this method to Stein’s loss. Compared to the estimator of Stein (1975, 1986), ours has five theoretical advantages: (1) it asymptotically minimizes the loss itself, instead of an estimator of the expected loss; (2) it does not necessitate post-processing via an ad hoc algorithm (called “isotonization”) to restore the positivity or the ordering of the covariance matrix eigenvalues; (3) it does not ignore any terms in the function to be minimized; (4) it does not require normality; and (5) it is not limited to applications where the sample size exceeds the dimension. In addition to these theoretical advantages, our estimator also improves upon Stein’s estimator in terms of finite-sample performance, as evidenced via extensive Monte Carlo simulations. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we show that some previously suggested estimators of the covariance matrix and its inverse are decision-theoretically optimal in the large-dimensional asymptotic limit with respect to the Frobenius loss function.
Der Artikel präsentiert eine zusammenfassende Auswertung einer Unternehmensbefragung vom September 2011 in der MEM-Industrie der Schweiz. Dabei ging es darum, in 11 ausgewählten Technologiegebieten im Energiebereich mit Schwergewicht von den Anbietern zu erfahren, wie diese die Marktpotenziale für diese Technologien in der Schweiz und auf dem Weltmarkt einschätzen, wie gross ihre bisherigen und geplanten Forschung- und Entwicklungsanstrengungen darin sind und welche Fachkräfte sie für die Realisierung der vermuteten Chancen benötigen inklusive bei deren Rekrutierung festgestellte Engpässe nach Disziplinen und Qualifikationsniveau. Die Befunde der Umfrage werden im Hinblick auf den möglichen Beitrag der Industrie zur Realisierung der Energiestrategie 2050 des Bundesrates beurteilt und kommentiert.
