Search

We study the interaction between financial wealth and early income growth. Using banking data on career starters in Belgium, we find higher income growth for individuals with higher financial wealth as early as 3 years into a career. While the roles of social capital and innate abilities appear limited, our results suggest that individuals with higher disposable wealth are more likely to find a job matching their human capital, in turn, boosting their chances of higher performance and consequent income growth. Policies addressing individuals’ capacity to accommodate frictions in the market for first jobs could therefore substantially promote economic mobility.

Humans differ in their strategic reasoning abilities and in beliefs about others' strategic reasoning abilities. Studying such cognitive hierarchies has produced new insights regarding equilibrium analysis in economics. This paper investigates the effect of cognitive hierarchies on long run behavior. Despite short run behavior being highly sensitive to variation in strategic reasoning abilities, this variation is not replicated in the long run. In particular, when generalized risk dominant strategy profiles exist, they emerge in the long run independently of the strategic reasoning abilities of players. These abilities may be arbitrarily low or high, heterogeneous across players, and evolving over time.

Anticipating those most at-risk of being acutely malnourished significantly shapes decisions that pertain to resource allocation and intervention in times of food crises. Yet, the assumption that household behavior in times of crisis is homogeneous—that households share the same capacity to adapt to external shocks—ostensibly prevails. This assumption fails to explain why, in a given geographical context, some households remain more vulnerable to acute malnutrition relative to others, and why a given risk factor may have a differential effect across households? In an effort to explore how variation in household behavior influences vulnerability to malnutrition, we use a unique household dataset that spans 23 Kenyan counties from 2016 to 2020 to seed, calibrate, and validate an evidence-driven computational model. We use the model to conduct a series of counterfactual experiments on the relationship between household adaptive capacity and vulnerability to acute malnutrition. Our findings suggest that households are differently impacted by given risk factors, with the most vulnerable households typically being the least adaptive. These findings further underscore the salience of household adaptive capacity, in particular, that adaption is less effective for economic vis-à-vis climate shocks. By making explicit the link between patterns of household behavior and vulnerability in the short- to medium-term, we underscore the need for famine early warning to better account for variation in household-level behavior.

Serial dictatorships have emerged as the canonical simple mechanisms in the literature on the allocation of indivisible goods without transfers. They are the only neutral and group-strategy-proof mechanisms in environments in which agents have no outside options and hence no individual rationality constraints (Svensson in Soc Choice Welfare 16:557–567, 1999). Accounting for outside options and individual rationality constraints, our main result constructs the class of group-strategy-proof, neutral, and non-wasteful mechanisms. These mechanisms are also Pareto efficient and we call them binary serial dictatorships. The abundance of the outside option—anybody who wants can opt out to get it—is crucial for our result.

In Vietnam, a country where religious expression is widespread, many gods and goddesses are commonly worshipped. Among those, Bà Tổ Cô (Family Goddess) is widely worshipped in the North of Vietnam due to her exceptional background as unmarried, young, and having spiritual roots, unlike other national and heroic figures. This article examines the sanctity of the Family Goddess by decoding the terms, worshippers, beliefs and practices, sacred encounters and supports. The research is a final result of decade-long field trips, archival study, and in-depth interviews with various stakeholders. The research findings show that the veneration of the Family Goddess in Northern Vietnam is a continuity of a long-standing tradition of worshipping female deities in Asia and thus emphasising the need to maintain this unique intangible heritage as a crucial part of Vietnamese cultural diversity.

Interference across competing firms in RCTs can be informative about market structure. An experiment that subsidizes a random subset of traders who buy cocoa from farmers in Sierra Leone illustrates this idea. Interpreting treatment-control differences in prices and quantities purchased from farmers through a model of Cournot competition reveals differentiation between traders is low. Combining this result with quasi-experimental variation in world prices shows that the number of traders competing is 50 percent higher than the number operating in a village. Own-price and cross-price supply elasticities are high. Farmers face a competitive market in this first stage of the value chain. (JEL L13, L14, O13, Q12, Q13)

Despite the importance of Christian democracy for economic and social policies throughout the 20th century, we know very little about the incorporation of labor interests into Catholic parties. Existing accounts claim that the formation of Catholic worker organizations is rooted in the process of industrialization and reforms of Catholic social teachings. In contrast, I argue that the integration of the workers’ wing was dependent on the position of farmers’ and business associations within Catholic parties and the integrative capacities of local religious institutions. The migration of Catholics from peripheral to industrialized areas put pressure on Catholic elites in urban centers to integrate workers via class-based associations. In contrast, entrenched interest groups of farmers and businesses, as well as clerical associations, fend off the creation of workers’ associations in rural regions in which industrialization took place. My argument is supported by newly collected district-level and survey data.

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)—including critical reflections on what changing a society’s relation to energy (efficiency) even means—have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasises the heterogeneity of SSH policy evidence that can be produced. The agenda will be of use for both (1) those new to the energy-SSH field (including policyworkers), for learnings on the capabilities and capacities of energy-SSH, and (2) established energy-SSH researchers, for insights on the collectively held futures of energy-SSH research.

How can quality be improved in markets in developing countries, which are known to be plagued by substandard and counterfeit (“fake”, in short) products? We study the market for antimalarial drugs in Uganda, where we randomly assign entry of a retailer (non-governmental organization (NGO)) providing a superior product—an authentic drug priced below the market—and investigate how incumbent firms and consumers respond. We find that the presence of the NGO had economically important effects. Approximately one year after the new market actor entered, the share of incumbent firms selling fake drugs dropped by more than 50% in the intervention villages, with higher quality drugs sold at significantly lower prices. Household survey evidence further shows that the quality improvements were accompanied by consumers expecting fewer fake drugs sold by drug stores. The intervention increased use of the antimalarial drugs overall. The results are consistent with a simple model where the presence of a seller committed to high quality, as opposed to an average firm, strengthens reputational incentives for competing firms to improve quality in order to not be forced out of the market, leading to “good driving out bad”.

Eine koronare Herzkrankheit, insbesondere ein akut lebensbedrohliches Ereignis wie ein Herzinfarkt, kann eine Posttraumatische Belastungsstörung (PTBS) zur Folge haben. Diese wirkt sich ungünstig auf die Manifestation und Progression der kardialen Gesundheit aus. In diesem Beitrag wird der Zusammenhang von koronaren Herzkrankheiten und dem Auftreten einer PTBS beschrieben und deren Besonderheiten und klinische Implikationen hervorgehoben.

Search engines serve as information gatekeepers on a multitude of topics that are prone to gender, ethnicity, and race misrepresentations. In this paper, we specifically look at the image search representation of migrant population groups that are often subjected to discrimination and biased representation in mainstream media, increasingly so with the rise of right-wing populist actors in the Western countries. Using multiple (n = 200) virtual agents to simulate human browsing behavior in a controlled environment, we collect image search results related to various terms referring to migrants (e.g., expats, immigrants, and refugees, seven queries in English and German used in total) from the six most popular search engines. Then, with the aid of manual coding, we investigate which features are used to represent these groups and whether the representations are subjected to bias. Our findings indicate that search engines reproduce ethnic and gender biases common for mainstream media representations of different subgroups of migrant population. For instance, migrant representations tend to be highly racialized, and female migrants as well as migrants at work tend to be underrepresented in the results. Our findings highlight the need for further algorithmic impact auditing studies in the context of representation of potentially vulnerable groups in web search results.

This paper investigates the persistent impact of financial crises on economic growth in different regimes of globalization. Relying on a nonlinear dynamic panel representation, this paper explains why the effects of globalization on growth weave into a tale of two opposite narratives. On average, a country experiences higher growth, the more open and integrated it is into the world. However, countries can also experience persistently lower medium-term output growth after a financial crisis, once globalization reaches a certain threshold. The benefits, as well as vulnerabilities, accrue earlier in the globalization process for low-income countries. © 2019 CEPII (Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales), a center for research and expertise on the world economy

Phylogenetic trees are a central tool for studying language evolution and have wide implications for understanding cultural evolution as a whole. For example, they have been the basis of studies on the evolution of musical instruments, religious beliefs and political complexity. Bayesian phylogenetic methods are transparent regarding the data and assumptions underlying the inference. One of these assumptions -- that languages change independently -- is incompatible with the reality of language evolution, particularly with language contact. When speakers interact, languages frequently borrow linguistic traits from each other. Phylogenetic methods ignore this issue, which can lead to errors in the reconstruction. More importantly, they neglect the rich history of language contact. A principled way of integrating language contact in phylogenetic methods is sorely missing. We present contacTrees, a Bayesian phylogenetic model with horizontal transfer for language evolution. The model efficiently infers the phylogenetic tree of a language family and contact events between its clades. The implementation is available as a package for the phylogenetics software BEAST 2. We apply contacTrees in a simulation study and a case study on a subset of well-documented Indo-European languages. The simulation study demonstrates that contacTrees correctly reconstructs the history of a simulated language family, including simulated contact events. Moreover, it shows that ignoring contact can lead to systematic errors in the estimated tree height, rate of change and tree topology, which can be avoided with contacTrees. The case study confirms that contacTrees reconstructs known contact events in the history of Indo-European and finds known loanwords, demonstrating its practical potential. The model has a higher statistical fit to the data than a conventional phylogenetic reconstruction, and the reconstructed tree height is significantly closer to well-attested estimates. Our method closes a long-standing gap between the theoretical and empirical models of cultural evolution. The implications are especially relevant for less documented language families, where our knowledge of past contacts and linguistic borrowings is limited. Since linguistic phylogenies have become the backbone of many studies of cultural evolution, the addition of this integral piece of the puzzle is crucial in the endeavour to understand the history of human culture.

No abstract available

The most frustrating outcome of an SEM analysis is nonconvergence. Nonconvergence typically happens when the sample size is small (N < 100) or very small (N < 50). To minimize the frequency of nonconvergence, this paper proposes a solution called bounded estimation. The idea is to use data-driven lower and upper bounds for a subset of the model parameters during estimation. In this paper, we provide a rationale to compute these bounds, and we study the effect of different approaches to employ these bounds on the frequency of nonconvergence. A simulation study shows that bounded estimation dramatically decreases the frequency of nonconvergence in both correctly and misspecified models, without any (negative) effects on the quality of the point estimates for the unbounded parameters.

Infection following surgical procedures leads to significant morbidity and mortality in all age groups. Sterile techniques, antibiotic prophylaxis and improved postoperative wound care have contributed to the decline of surgical site infections since the early days of surgery. Recommendations on the use of perioperative antimicrobial prophylaxis exist for adults, but are rare for the paediatric population. Here, we provide a standardised approach to the effective use of antimicrobial agents for the prevention of surgical site infections in children contributing to a targeted and rational perioperative use of antibiotics in Switzerland.

Theories of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences have provided a critical modeling innovation, incorporating a structured theory of the formation of reference points. An important prediction of these models is a monotone response in behavior to changes in expectations. To test such models we conduct a real-effort experiment manipulating expectations and examining consequences on effort provision. In contrast to the theory, we document substantial nonmonotonicities in the effort response to changing expectations. Our results provide some evidence on the limitations of expectations-based reference dependence. (JEL: D81, D84, D12, D03)

This paper analyzes fiscal policy from a growth model perspective, with a particular focus on taxation. It argues that tax policies channel resources into specific sectors of the economy and thereb...

Musical instruments provide material evidence to study the diversity and technical innovation of music in space and time. We employed a cultural evolutionary perspective to analyse organological data and their relation to language groups and population history in South America, a unique and complex geographic area for human evolution. The ethnological and archaeological native musical instrument record, documented in three newly assembled continental databases, reveals exceptionally high diversity of wind instruments. We explored similarities in the collection of instruments for each population, considering geographic patterns and focusing on groupings associated with language families. A network analysis of panpipe organological features illustrates four regional/cultural clusters: two in the Tropical Forest and two in the Andes. Twenty-five percent of the instruments in the standard organological classification are present in the archaeological, but not in the ethnographic record, suggesting extinction events. Most recent extinctions can be traced back to European contact, causing a reduction in indigenous cultural diversity. - Introduction - Issues in the phylogenetic study of material culture as related to musical instruments - Results -- Diversity patterns of musical instruments in South America. -- Geographical and linguistic patterns associated with musical instruments. -- Networks based on panpipe trait variation, compared against cultural areas. - Discussion - Methods

Comparative political economists typically analyze taxation as a matter of distribution. This article, by contrast, develops an allocational explanation of tax policy choices: as taxes channel resources into some economic activities and restrain others, they become subject to the allocational concerns of different sectors of the economy. We argue that sectoral coalitions straddling the class divide substantially influence the development of tax systems, and that the power of these coalitions is associated with differences in growth models. Employing a mixed methods approach, we first demonstrate a systematic association between growth models and consumption taxation across advanced capitalist countries. Afterward, we study the German value-added tax increase in 2005 to illustrate the political dynamics behind this result. In this debate, an export sector coalition prevailed over a domestic sector coalition that strongly opposed the reform. We conclude by discussing the wider implications for the study of taxation and comparative capitalism.

In this article, we propose a nonlinear dynamic latent class structural equation modeling (NDLC-SEM). It can be used to examine intra-individual processes of observed or latent variables. These pro...

Das Recht auf Selbstbestimmung beinhaltet das Recht eines jeden Patienten, einer medizinischen Behandlung zuzustimmen oder diese abzulehnen, auch wenn diese Entscheidung mit irreversiblen oder todlichen Folgen verbunden ist und/oder «unvernunftig» erscheinen mag. Voraussetzung ist, dass die Patienten bezuglich dieser Entscheidung urteilsfahig sind, wofur gewisse Kompetenzen vorhanden sein mussen.

The discussion of the social, political and economic consequences of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic mainly revolves around negative effects. This study exploits a unique opportunity and analyses data from a survey (N = 13,316) that happened to be in the field in the months of the development and eventual manifestation of the COVID-19 pandemic. It documents slightly higher levels of average general life satisfaction as well as of satisfaction with various specific aspects of life (health, work, work-life balance and leisure) during the lockdown among scientists in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. It is argued that the lockdown can be regarded as a large-scale social experiment of a very sudden and abrupt change of work and social life, which is unique in history. Daily survey data elicited before and after the lockdown allows the construction of a quasi-experimental design for analysing how this abrupt change of social reality has affected satisfaction. For scientists, the lockdown mainly entailed the transition to work from home, leading to a reduced speed of life and allowing for more flexibility in incorporating family and leisure into the work day. It is discussed how some of these mechanisms might apply to the general population., Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7 (1), ISSN:2662-9992

Lifetime psychedelic substance use has previously been linked to nature relatedness and pro-environmental behaviour. Yet, participants’ responses to the self-report measures in these studies may have been affected by stereotypical associations or confirmation bias. We therefore re-examined this link by measuring three pro-environmental dependent variables: nature relatedness, concerns about climate change, and objective knowledge about climate change. Additionally assessing lifetime experience with 30 psychoactive substances, we collected an international convenience sample for an online survey ( n = 641), Controlling for age, educational attainment, and covariation in substance use indicators, psychedelic use (primarily the use of psilocybin) predicted objective knowledge about climate change directly, and indirectly via nature relatedness. Further, it predicted concern about climate change indirectly via nature relatedness. The results suggest that the relationship of psychedelics with pro-environmental variables is not due to psychological biases, but manifests in variables as diverse as emotional affinity towards nature as well as knowledge about climate change.

Studies indicate that male students outperform female students in economic literacy and that a specific item format (selected-response, constructed-response) favours either males or females. This study analyses the relationship between item format and gender in economic-civic competence using the WBK-T2 test (“revidierter Test zur wirtschaftsbürgerlichen Kompetenz”). The WBK-T2 encompasses 32 items, of which 53% have a selected-response format and 47% a constructed-response format. To answer the research questions, we used a sample of 375 Swiss high school students and ran T-tests and multiple regression analyses. Male students significantly outperformed female students in the overall test score, in the selected-response test score and in the constructed-response test score, but effect sizes are rather small. Interest in socio-economic issues predicted but did not moderate the test scores; however, prior knowledge in economics did. Our results indicate that the balanced test form of the WBK-T2 regarding selected-response and constructed-response items does overcome the gender gap in overall test scores and format-related test scores for students with prior economic knowledge. However, this does not apply for students without prior knowledge in economics. Thus, there must be other test-external variables, such as prior knowledge in economics that cause the gender gap in economic-civic competence.

We evaluate linear stochastic discount factor models using an ex-post portfolio metric: the realized out-of-sample Sharpe ratio of mean-variance portfolios backed by alternative linear factor models. Using a sample of monthly US portfolio returns spanning the period 1968-2016, we find evidence that multifactor linear models have better empirical properties than the CAPM, not only when the cross-section of expected returns is evaluated in-sample, but also when they are used to inform one-month ahead portfolio selection. When we compare portfolios associated to multifactor models with mean-variance decisions implied by the single-factor CAPM, we document statistically significant differences in Sharpe ratios of up to 10 percent. Linear multifactor models that provide the best in-sample fit also yield the highest realized Sharpe ratios.

We study whether employment history provides information about a worker’s “work attitude”, that is, the tendency to act cooperatively and reliably in the workplace. We conjecture that, holding all else equal, frequent job changes can indicate poor work attitude and that this information is transmitted through employment histories. We find support for this hypothesis across three studies that employ complementary laboratory, field, and survey experiments, as well as in labor market panel data. First, a tightly controlled laboratory labor market experiment demonstrates that prior employment information allows employers to screen for reliable and cooperative workers and that these workers obtain better employment outcomes. Secondly, we conduct a field experiment that varies the frequency of job changes in applicants’ resumes and find that those with fewer job changes receive substantially more callbacks from prospective employers. Thirdly, a survey experiment with human resources professionals confirms that the resume manipulations in the field study create different perceptions of work attitude and that these largely account for the callback differences. Finally, we find evidence consistent with our hypothesized relationships in empirical labor market data. Our work highlights the potential importance of job history as a signal of work attitude in labor markets, and points to a potential cost of frequent job changes.

We propose a method to infer lead-lag networks of traders from the observation of their trade record as well as to reconstruct their state of supply and demand when they do not trade. The method relies on the Kinetic Ising model to describe how information propagates among traders, assigning a positive or negative "opinion" to all agents about whether the traded asset price will go up or down. This opinion is reflected by their trading behavior, but whenever the trader is not active in a given time window, a missing value will arise. Using a recently developed inference algorithm, we are able to reconstruct a lead-lag network and to estimate the unobserved opinions, giving a clearer picture about the state of supply and demand in the market at all times. We apply our method to a dataset of clients of a major dealer in the Foreign Exchange market at the 5 minutes time scale. We identify leading players in the market and define a herding measure based on the observed and inferred opinions. We show the causal link between herding and liquidity in the inter-dealer market used by dealers to rebalance their inventories.

Cet article est une présentation problématisée d’un cas atypique de la scène théâtrale suisse contemporaine : Vous êtes ici, une série théâtrale de science-fiction déroulant ses 10 épisodes sur l’ensemble de la saison 2020-2021. L’enjeu de la contribution est d’abord de montrer la productivité d’une tension entre stratégies immersives et stratégies performantielles, en abordant notamment une double question complémentaire : d’une part, comment le projet cherche-t-il à représenter une fiction d’anticipation climatique et sociale malgré les contraintes de la figuration théâtrale et, d’autre part, comment cherche-t-il à mobiliser des stratégies performantielles (a priori hostiles à toute représentation fictionnelle) au service d’un récit science-fictionnel. On essaie ensuite une critique socio-institutionnelle de plusieurs aspects du projet qui s’attelle à une brève étude de ses positionnements, notamment la mise en place d’un discours citoyenniste et d’une réflexion sur la gouvernance narrative, qui placent tous deux l’artiste en situation de créer les conditions d’une autre citoyenneté possible. On cherche à montrer qu’il y est d’abord et avant tout question de créer un macro-événement culturel qui use du théâtre de science-fiction comme un accrocheur de l’adhésion du public vers un macro-récit factuel qui le concerne directement : la crise éco-sociale qui guette leur ville, et les différents scénarios disponibles pour y répondre en tant que société. This paper is a problematized study of an atypical case of the contemporary Swiss theater scene: Vous êtes ici, a science-fiction theater series unfolding its 10 episodes over the 2020-2021 season. The contribution aims firstly to show the productivity of a tension between immersive strategies and performative strategies, by addressing a twofold complementary question: on one hand, how does the project seek to represent a fiction of climate and social anticipation despite the constraints of theatrical figuration and, on the other hand, how does it seek to mobilize performative strategies (hostile to any fictional representation) in the service of a science-fiction narrative? We secondly attempt a socio-institutional presentation of several aspects of the project, which begins with a brief study of its positioning, specifically the establishment of a republican discourse and a reflection on narrative governance, both of which place the artist in position to create the conditions for another possible citizenship. We seek to show that it is first and foremost a question of creating a cultural macro-event that uses science fiction theater as a hook for the public’s adherence to a factual macro-narrative that concerns them directly: the eco-social crisis that threatens their city, and the different scenarios available to respond to it as a society.

In 2–1–1 multilevel models for mediation, the effect of the mediator on the outcome is often decomposed into a between-cluster and a within-cluster effect. This can be achieved by either a manifest...

We document that states that experienced website glitches in the ACA’s first year faced higher average costs that persisted into future years. These dynamics are inconsistent with the standard strategic-pricing model, which requires non-localized common knowledge about market conditions, but are consistent with price-taking. Initial conditions can have a permanent effect—including convergence to a Pareto-dominated, stable equilibrium—under conditions that we show are plausible in this setting. Changing the fine from a fixed amount to a fraction of equilibrium prices increases the likelihood of reaching a Pareto-efficient equilibrium without increasing the equilibrium fine collected. (JEL H51, H75, I13, I18)

International audience; We investigate the welfare implications of two pre-crisis immigration waves (1991–2000 and 2001–2010) and of the post-crisis wave (2011–2015) for OECD native citizens. To do so, we develop a general equilibrium model that accounts for the main channels of transmission of immigration shocks – the employment and wage effects, the fiscal effect and the market size effect – and for the interactions between them. We parameterize our model for 20 selected OECD member states. We find that the three waves induce positive effects on the real income of natives; however, the size of these gains varies considerably across countries and across skill groups. In relative terms, the post-crisis wave induces smaller welfare gains compared to the previous ones. This is due to the changing origin mix of immigrants, which translates into lower levels of human capital and smaller fiscal gains. With a few exceptions, differences across cohorts explain a tiny fraction of the highly persistent, cross-country heterogeneity in the economic benefits from immigration.