Publikationen

This paper constitutes the first economic investigation into the potential detrimental role of smartphones in the workplace based on a field experiment. We exploit the conduct of a nationwide telephone survey, for which interviewers were recruited to work individually and in single offices for half a day. This setting allows to randomly impose bans on the use of interviewers’ personal smartphones during worktime while ruling out information spillovers between treatment conditions. Although the ban was not enforceable, we observe substantial effort increases from banning smartphones in the routine task of calling households, without negative implications linked to perceived employer distrust. Analyzing the number of conducted interviews per interviewer suggests that higher efforts do not necessarily translate into economic benefits for the employer. In our broad discussion of smartphone bans and their potential impact on workplace performance, we consider further outcomes of economic relevance based on data from employee surveys and administrative phone records. Finally, we complement the findings of our field experiment with evidence from a survey experiment and a survey among managers.

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dc.contributor.author: Köster, Mats

This article introduces novel backtests for the risk measure Expected Shortfall (ES) following the testing idea of Mincer and Zarnowitz (1969). Estimating a regression model for the ES stand-alone is infeasible and thus, our tests are based on a joint regression model for the Value at Risk (VaR) and the ES, which allows for different test specifications. These ES backtests are the first which solely backtest the ES in the sense that they only require ES forecasts as input variables. As the tests are potentially subject to model misspecification, we provide asymptotic theory under misspecification for the underlying joint regression. We find that employing a misspecification robust covariance estimator substantially improves the tests’ performance. We compare our backtests to existing joint VaR and ES backtests and find that our tests outperform the existing alternatives throughout all considered simulations. In an empirical illustration, we apply our backtests to ES forecasts for 200 stocks of the S&P 500 index.

Positive effects of person-environment fit on job satisfaction and persistence are well documented. However, little is known about the consequences of person-vocation (P-V) fit for vocational education and training (VET). Using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we examine the influence of selected P-V fit indicators (educational match, interest congruence, skill congruence) on training satisfaction and premature contract termination (PCT) for 4,097 trainees in VET. We find that most P-V incongruences do not lead to negative consequences. Training satisfaction is not affected by interest congruence and skill congruence. However, moderate overeducation (intermediately qualified adolescents working in occupations with high shares of low-qualified trainees) enhances training satisfaction. For PCT, there is a general effect of undereducation; undereducation increases the probability of PCT independent of educational qualification for the occupation. PCT is not affected by skill congruence and only for Realistic interests, congruence with the vocational environment reduces PCT probability.

Because of the high social relevance of an economics education, many countries now focus on the enhancement of economic competencies in schools. International results show strong deficits in basic economic knowledge, especially for students in upper secondary education, who usually enter higher education. Furthermore, it is not clear what effects these competencies have on subsequent transitions, which is primarily due to a lack of longitudinal studies. Against this background, this article systematically embeds findings from a Swiss longitudinal study in the international context. Thereby, Switzerland is systematically compared with other countries that also provide substantial research on economic education (e.g., the U.S. and Japan). Lessons learned from the Swiss case will be discussed from an international perspective, and implications for future international research will be derived.

We investigate cheating in work groups, to empirically test the idea of an honest workplace environment as a determinant of performance. Three individuals receive team-based performance pay for executing a real-effort task. In addition, two of them have the opportunity to obtain a bonus in a dice game, which allows cheating without exposure by misreporting a secret die roll. We are particularly interested in the behavioral response of the bystander as the potential witness to the dishonest action. To identify the implications of lies at work, the rules of the bonus game were altered to randomly prevent cheating, or not, across treatment conditions while holding the monetary consequences constant. Survey data enables us to analyze effect heterogeneity and to explore mechanisms underlying behavioral responses. We begin our analysis by estimating the mean lying rate and find that the opportunity-to-cheat is exploited in roughly 42% of cases. The probability of misreporting increases if the cheater's partner in crime is male. Contrary to claims on the importance of honesty at work, we do not observe a reduction in performance when cheating takes place, neither for the bystander nor for the whole team. Bounded awareness could be an explanation, as we find substantial evidence for effect heterogeneity along the lines of information preferences. Bystanders with higher preferences for inconvenient information provide relatively low task performance, compared to those with lower information preferences, who seem to turn a blind eye to the dishonest action of their co-workers by putting increased effort into their work.

Using hand-collected and web-scraped data on 7208 matches and 3266 players from the highest division of German male football, this paper examines how birthplace diversity affects team performance. The results of two instrumental variable analyses suggest that birthplace diversity has a hump-shaped effect on team performance. To explain our result, we argue that nationally diverse teams have a wider range of skills and face greater communication barriers.

Despite the economic, social, and humanitarian costs of border closures, more than 1000 new international border closures were introduced in response to the 2020-2021 pandemic by nearly every country in the world. The objective of this study was to examine whether these border closures reduced the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Prior to 2020, the impacts of border closures on disease spread were largely unknown, and their use as a pandemic policy was advised against by international organizations. We tested whether they were helpful in reducing spread by using matching techniques on our hand-coded COVID Border Accountability Project (COBAP) Team database of international closures, converted to a time-series cross-sectional data format. We controlled for national-level internal movement restrictions (domestic lockdowns) using the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) time-series data. We found no evidence in favor of international border closures, whereas we found a strong association between national-level lockdowns and a reduced spread of SARS-CoV-2 cases. More research must be done to evaluate the byproduct effects of closures versus lockdowns as well as the efficacy of other preventative measures introduced at international borders.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted substantial academic attention right after its establishment in 2013. It has produced an array of scientific works analyzing various aspects of this multi-component phenomenon. Our paper is an attempt to systematically classify and further scrutinize the BRI literature within the management and economics field in order to navigate further academic inquiry into the BRI phenomenon. We used the Scopus database and a guided delimitation approach to ensure the quality and relevance of the selected papers. Based on the identified themes we propose promising avenues for future research within the Economics and Management research domain.

What happens when immigrant girls are given increased opportunities to integrate into the workplace and society, but their parents value more traditional cultural outcomes? We answer this question in the context of a reform which granted automatic birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after 1 January 2000. Using survey data, we collected from students in 57 schools and comparing those born in the months before vs. after the reform, we find the introduction of birthright citizenship lowers measures of life satisfaction and self-esteem for immigrant girls by 0.32 and 0.25 standard deviations, respectively. This is especially true for Muslims, where parents are likely to prefer more traditional cultural outcomes than their daughters. Moreover, we find that Muslim girls granted birthright citizenship are less integrated into German society: they are both more socially isolated and less likely to self-identify as German. Exploring mechanisms for these unintended drops in well-being and assimilation, we find that immigrant Muslim parents invest less in their daughters’ schooling and that these daughters receive worse grades in school if they are born after the reform. Parents are also less likely to speak German with these daughters. Consistent with a rise in intra-family conflict, birthright citizenship results in disillusionment where immigrant Muslim girls believe their chances of achieving their educational goals are lower and the perceived odds of having to forgo a career for a family rise. In contrast, immigrant boys experience, if anything, an improvement in well-being, integration, and schooling outcomes. Taken together, the findings point towards immigrant girls being pushed by parents to conform to a role within traditional culture, whereas boys are allowed to take advantage of the opportunities that come with citizenship. To explain these findings, we construct a simple game-theoretic model which builds on Akerlof and Kranton (2000), where identity-concerned parents constrain their daughter’s choices, and hence lower their daughter’s well-being, when faced with the threat of integration. Alternative models can explain some of the findings in isolation.

This study investigates how the talent management (TM) practices of talent attraction, development, and retention contribute to organizational ambidexterity (OA) and firm performance in the context of Russia. Based on a cross-sectional data set of 88 local Russian firms, we investigate the association between the TM practices and OA dimensions and examine the role of exploration and exploitation in the TM–performance relationship. The ordinary least squares regression results show that the effects of talent attraction on exploration, talent development on exploitation, and talent retention on both OA dimensions are significant and positive. Meanwhile, the simple and parallel mediation analyses (using the Hayes' PROCESS program) demonstrate that OA, particularly exploration, mediates the TM–performance relationship. This study contributes to the overall literature on TM and ambidexterity by considering TM practices as crucial antecedents of OA and explaining how and why TM positively affect firm performance.

It is a widely held belief that people's choices are less sensitive to changes in value as value increases. For example, the subjective difference between $11 and $12 is believed to be smaller than between $1 and $2. This idea is consistent with applications of the Weber-Fechner Law and divisive normalization to value-based choice and with psychological interpretations of diminishing marginal utility. According to random utility theory in economics, smaller subjective differences predict less accurate choices. Meanwhile, in the context of sequential sampling models in psychology, smaller subjective differences also predict longer response times. Based on these models, we would predict decisions between high-value options to be slower and less accurate. In contrast, some have argued on normative grounds that choices between high-value options should be made with less caution, leading to faster and less accurate choices. Here, we model the dynamics of the choice process across three different choice domains, accounting for both discriminability and response caution. Contrary to predictions, we mostly observe faster and more accurate decisions (i.e., higher drift rates) between high-value options. We also observe that when participants are alerted about incoming high-value decisions, they exert more caution and not less. We rule out several explanations for these results, using tasks with both subjective and objective values. These results cast doubt on the notion that increasing value reduces discriminability.

We collect data on the careers of 189 authors who published aid effectiveness estimates during the 1970 to 2011 period, and apply meta-regression analysis to investigate the impact of authors' careers on the degree of selectivity in which results are reported. Among non-tenured researchers, publication selection bias and research inflation are increasing with age, on average. This bias is highest among older non-tenured researchers. In search for channels, we find suggestive evidence that a portion of the preferential reporting in favour of aid effectiveness is associated with non-tenured authors’ links with aid agencies.

We conduct a comprehensive pricing study of additional tier 1 ​(AT1) contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds issued by Eurozone banks. By accounting for an extensive set of pricing determinants related to the regulatory framework, the security design and key market variables, we show that the regulatory concept of the maximum distributable amount (MDA) introduced in 2016 has a significant and economically meaningful impact on CoCo spreads. Furthermore, we examine whether the market stress induced by the COVID-19 pandemic influences the determinants of CoCo spreads. Our results show that the pricing factors remain stable throughout tranquil and volatile periods.