Publikationen

Risk-neutral distributions of the S&P 500 are informative about the COVID-19 pandemic beyond what one can learn from index values and the market fear gauge of the VIX alone. We learn that, on February 20, 2020, the index did not yet reflect the impending crisis. Only on March 16, 2020, was the full impact visible, with a pronounced bimodality for longer-maturity options revealing a sizeable crash scenario. The corresponding physical distribution is more symmetric and features a high-volatility crash scenario. Firms bought crash protection ahead of the index crash, whereas retail customers bought it as the index was already recovering.

Sowohl im privaten Umfeld als auch in Bildungskontexten gewinnen Erklärvideos zunehmend an Bedeutung. Studien zeigen, dass die Nutzung von Erklärvideos mit positiven Effekten verbunden ist. Dies gilt nicht nur für Kriterien wie Motivation oder Aufmerksamkeit, sondern auch für den Wissenszuwachs. Es stellt sich daher die Frage, wie Erklärvideos gestaltet sein sollten.

Die vorliegende Studie verfolgt zwei grundlegende Ziele: erstens eine systematische Erfassung zentraler Bereiche des Schulleitungshandelns an beruflichen Schulen in der Schweiz und zweitens die empirische Überprüfung der Wirksamkeit eines einjährigen Trainingsprogramms zur Förderung relevanter Führungskompetenzen von Schulleitenden. Das hierfür entwickelte Training umfasste eine Serie von Führungskräfte-Workshops mit kombinierten Coachings. Auf Basis einer quasi-experimentellen Untersuchung mit Experimental- und Kontrollgruppe wurde die Wirksamkeit der Intervention mehrperspektivisch untersucht. Die Ergebnisse der Studie machen deutlich, dass an den 29 betrachteten Schulen die transformationale Führung der dominierende Führungsstil der Schulleitenden darstellt. Darüber hinaus zeigt sich, dass die Lehrpersonen (N = 607) das Leitungshandeln der Schulleitenden im Mittel weniger positiv bewerten als dies die Mitglieder der Schulleitung (N = 101) tun. Aus Sicht der Schulleitenden lassen sich vereinzelte positive Effekte auf das Leitungshandeln identifizieren, welche auf das Trainingsprogramm zurückgeführt werden können.

We re-consider the bilateral bargaining problem of a multi-product, manufacturer–retailer trading relationship. O’Brien and Shaffer (2005) have shown that the unbundling of contracts leads to downward distorted production levels if seller power is strong, while otherwise the joint profit maximizing quantities are contracted (which is also always the case when bundling contracts are feasible). We show that the unbundling of contracts also leads to downward distorted output levels when the buyer firm has sufficient (Nash) bargaining power (i.e., buyer power). Our result is driven by cost substitutability (diseconomies of scope).

Background:
With DRG payments, hospitals can game the system by 'upcoding' true patient's severity of illness. This paper takes into account that upcoding can be performed by the chief physician and hospital management, with the extent of the distortion depending on hospital's internal decision-making process. The internal decision making can be of the principal-agent type with the management as the principal and the chief physician as the agent, but the chief physicians may be able to engage in negotiations with management resulting in a bargaining solution.

Results:
In case of the principal-agent mechanism, the distortion due to upcoding is shown to accumulate, whereas in the bargaining case it is avoided at the level of the chief physician.

Conclusion:
In the presence of upcoding it may be appropriate for the sponsor to design a payment system that fosters bargaining to avoid additional distortions even if this requires extra funding.

This paper studies the effect of oil wealth on the provision of education in the early 20th century United States. Using information on the location and discovery of major oil fields, I find that oil wealth increased local revenue and education spending. However, population increased, and as consequence, schooling quality did not improve across the board. Nominal teacher wages increased, and oil-rich counties were more likely to participate in the Rosenwald school building program for blacks. However, neither student-teacher ratios nor school attendance rates improved in the wake of oil discoveries.

We examine “Forward Guidance Contracts,” which penalize central bankers for choosing high interest rates. We integrate those contracts into the New Keynesian Framework and show that they can be used to overcome a liquidity trap. Moreover, although the government takes only a share of the social benefits into account when it has to decide whether to offer the contract, we demonstrate that for plausible parameter values the government will always find it desirable to offer the contract in a liquidity trap but not in normal times. Finally, we show that the optimal duration of such contracts is typically very short.

In higher education, across countries, a large share of students choose to study economics. Although there is only a small difference in the share of female and male students in that field, there is robust empirical evidence of a gender gap in economic competencies, showing that male students in most cases outperform female students. There is a broad discussion about the differences in gender-specific socializations that cause this gender gap. However, no research exists on the long-term effects of this gender gap. This study uses longitudinal and representative data of N = 1397 Swiss students (824 female students) to analyse the gender-specific effects of economic competencies at the end of the upper secondary level on their aspiration and decision to study economics. The results show that economic knowledge and interest in economics have a substantially stronger effect on the choice of economics for female students. The aspiration to study strongly mediates these effects. We argue that these results can mainly be traced back to different interests and self-perceptions of skills and abilities in economics caused by gender-specific socialization. Possible implications of gender socialization and discrimination in economics for secondary and higher education and for the labour market are discussed.

The choice between safe and risky assets represents behavior towards risk: more risk‐averse investors buy more safe assets. We develop and test a general model that applies this intuition to the time allocation between risky effort and risk‐free leisure under linear incentives. When risk increases with effort, risk‐averse agents choose less effort, but when risk is independent of effort, effort choice is unaffected by risk preferences. In many incentive contracts, income risk is multiplicative with, rather than additive to effort, sales commissions being one example. In such cases, lower effort by the risk‐averse is a hitherto undocumented behavior towards risk.

We investigate the effect of individualism—a dimension of culture that is strongly associated with entrepreneurship—on venture-capital investments using a large cross-country sample. Our sample consists of 1496 country-year observations and includes 88 countries from 1998 to 2014. Controlling for economic conditions, the legal environment, and different aspects of culture, we find that individualism is positively and significantly related to venture-capital investments and explains 30% of cross-country variation. This result is stable across different subsamples, several measures of venture-capital investments, and even holds when using the political system 200 years ago as an instrument for individualism. The quality of formal institutions (rule of law) and entrepreneurial attitudes (uncertainty avoidance) partially mediate the effect of individualism on venture-capital investments, while economic conditions (GDP per capita) moderate this effect.

I model the strategic interaction between scientists aiming for promotion and a research institution that seeks a highly productive faculty by setting a maternity allowance in the form of a minimum promotion standard. The model shows that maternity allowances need not derive from moral justice arguments but can emerge endogenously from efficiency considerations. The underlying mechanism rests on the assumption that exceptionally productive female professionals are also exceptionally productive if they choose to become mothers. Even though motherhood temporarily handicaps their productivity, it is exactly this cost of motherhood that signals the mothers’ intrinsic high productivity. I explicitly refer to the academic labor market and use empirical evidence from academia to justify the model's specification, but the conclusions carry over to promotion decisions at the executive level in most professional lines of occupation.

This paper examines the decision-making process of students from an economic perspective to understand the determinants of an individual’s willingness to provide effort. Our theoretical model predicts that ability and job market prospects are positive determinants. Analyzing a novel dataset on thousands of German students, however, we instead find that ability has a significantly negative effect on effort. It seems that the marginal gain of increasing effort in terms of higher expected income after studying is lower for high-ability students compared to low-ability students. In regard to the second determinant, the evidence rejects a similar argument, according to which great job market prospects may impair student effort. Applying an instrumental variable approach based on official unemployment data on regional labor markets, we can confirm our prediction on the positive role of perceived employment prospects in actual student behavior.

Sowohl im privaten Umfeld als auch im schulischen Bereich gewinnen Erklärvideos zunehmend an Bedeutung. Empirische Befunde belegen positive Effekte von Erklärvideos für kognitive (Wissenszuwachs) sowie für nicht-kognitive Faktoren (z.B. Motivation, Aufmerksamkeit). Dies gilt sowohl für die Rezeption als auch die Produktion von Videoerklärungen. Darüber hinaus befassen sich empirische Studien zunehmend mit der Analyse der Wirkung verschiedener Gestaltungselemente von Erklärvideos (z.B. Interaktivität, Eigenschaften der erklärenden Person). Der Beitrag verfolgt das Ziel, vorliegende empirische Befunde zu verschiedenen Gestaltungselementen zu systematisieren. Zu diesem Zweck wurden 24 Studien gesichtet, die sich mit der Wirkung einzelner Gestaltungselemente befassen. Auf Basis der Befunde werden Gestaltungsempfehlungen für Erklärvideos ausgesprochen. Es zeigt sich, dass insbesondere der Einsatz interaktiver Elemente bedeutsam für den Lernerfolg ist. Zudem wirken sich die gewählte Perspektive (d.h. die Entscheidung, ob das Video aus der Sicht des Erklärenden oder der Person, die das Modell beobachtet, gezeigt wird) sowie das Design (z.B. Ästhetik) signifikant auf den Lernerfolg aus. Mit Blick auf die erklärende Person scheint lediglich das Alter bedeutsam zu sein – nicht jedoch das Geschlecht oder deren Sichtbarkeit im Erklärvideo.

Questionnaires eliciting personality traits and other characteristics of a person are important tools for many experimental economists. While a lot is known about how to run experiments and about how to construct and run field surveys, much less is known about how to administer such surveys in a post-experimental context. A short survey among experimental economists documents substantial heterogeneity in the procedures used, and in expectations about the effects of procedural details. I run an experiment on five aspects that are specific to the laboratory context. I find that (i) paying participants as soon as they finish the questionnaire yields a lower answer quality than waiting for all or an intermediate procedure; (ii) having participants enter their names for receipt preparation does not reduce answer quality (and does not increase the social desirability of answers); (iii) a higher overall payment increases answer quality, while (iv) framing the fixed part of participants’ payment as being “for completing the questionnaire” as well as (v) progress feedback do not affect answer quality.

This paper studies the extent to which working couples can insure one another against cyclical fluctuations in the labor market and examines the implications of joint household decision-making for cyclical fluctuations in the unemployment rate. For this purpose, I provide a dynamic life-cycle model of households that make joint savings and job search decisions in the presence of aggregate shocks. I show that two key mechanisms are at play. The first is the added-worker effect, which leads to counter-cyclical search intensity because workers increase search intensity when their spouse becomes unemployed. The second is the comparative advantage effect, according to which couples' job search efforts are coordinated based on the relative returns to search of each spouse. I estimate the model using data from the US Current Population Survey, and find that joint household decision-making contributes to the counter-cyclicality of women’s unemployment rate, but not for men. Moreover, joint household decision-making lowers the welfare costs of cyclicality.

People with little motivation to participate in surveys can affect empirical research when they abstain from but also when they actually participate in interviews. This paper investigates whether happiness data are susceptible to such measurement bias. Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) reveals a strong relationship between self-reported life satisfaction and several indicators of respondent motivation, such as subsequent panel attrition. One explanation for this finding is that respondents on the margin of participation truly have lower life satisfaction. Alternatively, their low motivation may be the cause for an underreporting of life satisfaction. To learn more about this, an instrumental variable approach identifies future panel quitters with low motivation by using the occurrence of interviewer attrition in the year after the interview. The results of this analysis suggest that self-reported life satisfaction declines because of low respondent motivation. A discussion of the implications for analyses of happiness data underscores the potential importance of respondent motivation regardless of the explanation for why interviewees with low motivation report lower life satisfaction.