The University of Zurich is ranked as the best Swiss university with regard to economic publications: This is the finding of the new Tilburg University Economics Ranking available. With rank 26 the University of Zurich also covers one of the top places in Continental Europe.
Organizations depend on members' "loyalty" for their success. Studying a cooperative's attempt to increase deliveries by members, we show that the threat of sanctions leads to highly heterogeneous response among members. Despite the cooperative not actually enforcing the threatened sanctions, positive effects for some members persist for several months. Other members "exit," stopping delivering altogether. Among non-compliant members we document substantial heterogeneity in beliefs about the legitimacy of the sanctions. This lack of common understanding highlights the role played by managers in organizations and provides a candidate explanation for lack of sanctions enforcement documented by Ostrom (1990) and other studies.
This paper documents how saving constraints can spill over into other markets. When producers value saving devices, trustworthy buyers can offer them infrequent payments—a commitment tool—and purchase at a lower price. This affects the nature of competition in the output market. We present a model of this interlinked saving-output market for the case of the Kenyan dairy industry. Multiple data sources, experiments, and a calibration exercise support its microfoundations and predictions concerning: i) producers’ demand for infrequent payments; ii) an asymmetry across buyers in the ability to credibly commit to low frequency payments; iii) a segmented market equilibrium where buyers compete by providing either liquidity or saving services to producers; iv) low supply response to price increases. We discuss additional evidence from other contexts, including labor markets, and derive policy implications concerning contract enforcement, financial access, and market structure.
Der Wirtschaftsforscher Angus Deaton hat die Entwicklungsökonomie geprägt. Dank seinen bahnbrechenden Beiträgen konnte dokumentiert werden, wie sich über die Zeit der Wohlstand in der Welt erhöht hat.
Die Entwicklungshilfe steht gegenwärtig häufig in der Kritik. Eine junge Forschungsrichtung in der Ökonomie sucht mit wissenschaftlich sehr präzisen Methoden zu zeigen, welche Hilfsprojekte wirklich wirksam sind. Die Resultate sind bisweilen überraschend.
The microfinance revolution has transformed access to financial services for low-income populations worldwide. As a result, it has become one of the most talked-about innovations in global development in recent decades. However, its expansion has not been without controversy. While many hailed it as a way to end world poverty and promote female empowerment, others condemned it as a disaster for the poor. Female empowerment has often been seen as one of the key promises of the industry. In part, this is based on the fact that more than 80% of its poorest clients, i.e., those who live on less than $1.25/day, are women. This paper discusses what we have learned so far about the potential and limits of microfinance and how insights from research and practice can help inform the industry's current products, policies and future developments.
Multi-echo fMRI data acquisition has been widely investigated and suggested to optimize sensitivity for detecting the BOLD signal. Several methods have also been proposed for the combination of data with different echo times. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether these advanced echo combination methods provide advantages over the simple averaging of echoes when state-of-the-art group-level random-effect analyses are performed. Both resting-state and task-based dual-echo fMRI data were collected from 27 healthy adult individuals (14 male, mean age = 25.75 years) using standard echo-planar acquisition methods at 3T. Both resting-state and task-based data were subjected to a standard image pre-processing pipeline. Subsequently the two echoes were combined as a weighted average, using four different strategies for calculating the weights: (1) simple arithmetic averaging, (2) BOLD sensitivity weighting, (3) temporal-signal-to-noise ratio weighting and (4) temporal BOLD sensitivity weighting. Our results clearly show that the simple averaging of data with the different echoes is sufficient. Advanced echo combination methods may provide advantages on a single-subject level but when considering random-effects group level statistics they provide no benefit regarding sensitivity (i.e., group-level t-values) compared to the simple echo-averaging approach. One possible reason for the lack of clear advantages may be that apart from increasing the average BOLD sensitivity at the single-subject level, the advanced weighted averaging methods also inflate the inter-subject variance. As the echo combination methods provide very similar results, the recommendation is to choose between them depending on the availability of time for collecting additional resting-state data or whether subject-level or group-level analyses are planned.
Obesity and weight gain are severe complications of mental illness, especially schizophrenia. They result from changes in lifestyle and nutrition, side effects of medication and other, less well-understood factors. Recent studies suggest that obesity and weight gain are linked to psychopathology. Specifically, severe psychopathology is associated with greater weight dysregulation, typically weight gain. However, our knowledge about the neuroscientific basis of weight gain in schizophrenia is currently limited. We propose that altered reward anticipation, which in turn is related to striatal dopaminergic dysregulation, may explain why obesity is more prevalent in individuals with mental illness. We review evidence that reward anticipation and weight change are linked by a core deficit in dopaminergic striatal circuits. Several lines of evidence, running from animal studies to preclinical and clinical studies, suggest that striatal dopaminergic neurotransmission is a major hub for the regulation of eating behavior and that dopamine links eating behavior to other motivated behavior. From this perspective, the present review outlines a unifying perspective on dopaminergic reward anticipation as a theoretical frame to link weight gain, medication effects and psychopathology. We derive important but open empirical questions and present perspectives for new therapeutic concepts.
This study provides evidence of government distortion of news coverage among independently owned media outlets in a democratic regime. It uses data from 1946 to 2010 and documents that U.S. news coverage of human rights abuses committed by foreign governments was associated with membership on the United Nations Security Council and the degree of political alliance with the United States. For countries that were not allied with the United States, coverage increased with membership; for countries that are strongly allied with the United States, coverage decreased with membership. There is an analogous effect on reports of human rights abuses by the U.S. State Department, but no such effect on human rights practices according to other measures. The results are driven by the Reagan and Bush Sr. Administrations, 1981–1992, a period during which the government was known to have actively influenced the press.
The government is the biggest buyer in the economy of most countries. At the same time, the public procurement process if often thought to be fraught with corruption and malpractice. However, there is little evidence regarding the impact of audits aimed at reducing such malpractice. This paper investigates the effect of being audited on public entities' subsequent procurement practices in Chile. For identification, we exploit a scoring rule of the national auditing agency, which allows for regression discontinuity analysis. Our preliminary results show that the audits seem to lead to a temporary shift towards less transparent modalities of procurement. The share of the amount of total purchases through direct negotiations increases by around 20 percentage points, at the expense of the use of public auctions. The effect is most pronounced during months when the audit is taking place and disappears completely by the subsequent fiscal year. Since audits in Chile rarely happen in consecutive years, and since the audit typically only covers the most recent completed fiscal year, this time pattern of effects is consistent with public agents responding to a temporary drop in audit risk during the year of the audit.
