Im August 2017 startet der nächste Lehrgang für den berufsbegleitenden Executive MBA der Universität Zürich. Bewerbungen für den kommenden Lehrgang sind noch bis Ende Juni 2017 möglich.
Per Ende Juni 2017 verabschieden sich zwei langjährige Professoren, die die Forschung und Lehre an der Fakultät in den letzten über 20 Jahren wesentlich mitgeprägt haben.
Die jüngste Finanzkrise, welche die Welt ab 2007 durchschüttelte, ist mittlerweile gut erforscht. Die zeitliche Distanz erlaubt der Forschung auch eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den Reaktionen der Regulatoren und Aufsichtsbehörden. Die Jahrestagung des Universitären Forschungsschwerpunkts Finanzmarktregulierung griff diesen Faden auf und stand ganz im Zeichen von lebhaften Debatten über Corporate Governance in der Finanzindustrie.
This paper analyzes the design of innovation contests when the quality of an innovation depends on the research approach, but the best approach is unknown. Inducing a variety of research approaches is desirable because it generates an option value. We show that suitable contests can induce such variety. The optimal contest is a bonus tournament, where suppliers can choose only between a low bid and a high bid. We then compare the optimal contest to other commonly studied institutions, such as scoring auctions and fixed-prize tournaments.
Ein exklusiver Voreinblick in die nächste Ausgabe des Oec. Magazins, die nächste Woche erscheint: Wir haben den bekannten Schriftsteller und Alumnus Philipp Tingler zu einem Gespräch getroffen.
Die UZH verbessert sich in der diesjährigen Ausgabe des QS World University Rankings um sieben Plätze und ist neu auf Rang 73 von über 950 bewerteten Universitäten. Damit findet sich die UZH unter den Top 8% der beurteilten Universitäten und unter den Top 1% aller Universitäten weltweit.
Pregnancy conditions have been shown to matter for later economic success, but many threats to fetal development that have been identified are difficult to prevent. In this paper I study seasonal influenza, a preventable illness that comes around every year and causes strong inflammatory responses in pregnant women. Using administrative data from Denmark, I identify the effects of maternal influenza on the exposed offspring via sibling comparison, exploiting both society-wide influenza spread and information on individual mothers who suffer strong infections during pregnancy. In the short term, maternal influenza leads to a doubling of prematurity and low birth weight, by triggering premature labor among women infected in the third trimester. Following exposed offspring into young adulthood, I observe a 9% earnings reduction and a 35% increase in welfare dependence. These long-term effects are strongest for influenza infections during the second trimester and they are partly explained by a decline in educational attainment, pointing to cognitive impairment. This effect pattern suggests that maternal influenza damages the fetus
through multiple mechanisms, and much of the damage may not be visible at birth. Taken together, these results provide evidence that strong infections during pregnancy are an often overlooked prenatal threat with long-term consequences.
We study the investment of criminal organizations in the legal economy. We focus on Italy, a country historically plagued by a conspicuous presence of mafia-type organizations. By using the exogenous credit contraction imposed by the 2007 financial crisis we highlight how the consequences for newly established enterprises have been less severe in areas with organized crime. Although criminal organizations are largely detrimental for local economic conditions, their economic activity might act as an economic stabilizer in the short-run, especially in a context of weak institutional presence. The investment in the legal economy allows criminal organizations to launder money, make profits, and raise social consensus through the provision of alternative sources of social insurance.
Researchers frequently test identifying assumptions in regression based research designs (which include instrumental variables or difference-in-differences models) by adding additional control variables on the right hand side of the regression. If such additions do not affect the coefficient of interest (much) a study is presumed to be reliable. We caution that such invariance may result from the fact that the observed variables used in such robustness checks are often poor measures of the potential underlying confounders. In this case, a more powerful test of the identifying assumption is to put the variable on the left hand side of the candidate regression. We provide derivations for the estimators and test statistics involved, as well as power calculations, which can help applied researchers interpret their findings. We illustrate these results in the context of various strategies which have been suggested to identify the returns to schooling.
Is social capital a substitute or a complement to formal institutions for achieving economic growth? A number of recent micro studies suggest that interpersonal trust has its greatest impact on economic performance when court institutions are relatively weak. The conventional wisdom from most macro studies, however, is that social capital is unconditionally good for growth. On the basis of the micro evidence, we outline an investment game between a producer and a lender in an incomplete-contracts setting. A key insight is that social capital will have the greatest effect on the total surplus from the game at lower levels of institutional strength and that the effect of social capital vanishes when institutions are very strong. When we bring this prediction to an empirical cross-country growth regression, it is shown that the marginal effect of social capital (in the form of interpersonal trust) decreases with institutional strength. Our results imply that a one standard deviation rise in social capital in weakly institutionalized Nigeria should increase economic growth by 1.8 percentage points, whereas the same increase in social capital only increases growth by 0.3 percentage points in strongly institutionalized Canada.
