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Individuals often face challenges when making optimal decisions, even when ample information is available. For example, processing all relevant information is costly, and short-term benefits often influence individuals’ decisions despite good intentions. Our research aims to help policy makers understand irrational behaviors of individuals, enabling them to design better policies and markets.
Learn more about recent research projects with significant societal impact in this Thought Leadership Area.
Closing the Gender Gap: Pathways to Equality
Over the past decades, Switzerland has made substantial progress towards integrating women into the workforce. Nevertheless, gender inequalities in the labor market remain very high. They are closely associated with the birth of a womanʼs first child and largely reflect traditional gender roles. Labor market economist Prof. Josef Zweimüller is researching how these gaps can be closed.
A Theory of Simplicity in Games and Mechanism Design (Marek Pycia and co-authors)
Matching with Externalities (Marek Pycia and co-authors)
Does Market Interaction Erode Moral Values? (Björn Bartling, Ernst Fehr and co-authors)
Teaching self-regulation (Ernst Fehr and co-authors)
Neurocomputational evidence that conflicting prosocial motives guide distributive justice (Christian C. Ruff and co-authors)
Behavioral Constraints on the Design of Subgame-Perfect Implementation Mechanisms (Ernst Fehr and co-authors)
Informational Requirements of Nudging (Nick Netzer and co-authors)
The impacts of remote learning in secondary education during the pandemic in Brazil (Guilherme Lichand and co-authors)
Impact: The paper impacted Brazil's decisions to reopen schools amidst the pandemic. The paper was presented to spe-cial committees of the House of Representatives and the national Congress in Brasil, and in São Paulo State, where the study was based, was the first in the country to reopen schools for 3.6 million students, based on the findings of the paper.
Vouchers for Future Kidney Transplants to Overcome 'Chronological Incompatibility' Between Living Donors and Recipients (Marek Pycia and co-authors)
Impact: This multidisciplinary paper introduced a responsible system of managing kidney transplants. The paper led to the creation of the kidney voucher program at the US National Kidney Registry (NKR). The vouchers introduced are directly responsible for about 40% of over 1000 annual kidney donations in the U.S. Registry and they indirectly facilitate an even larger percentage of kidney exchanges.
Indirect Compellence and Institutional Change: U.S. Extraterritorial Law Enforcement and the Deinstitutionalization of Swiss Banking Secrecy (Andreas Georg Scherer and co-authors)
Regional innovation effects of applied research institutions (Uschi Backes-Gellner and co-authors)
Tertiary Education Expansion and Regional Firm Development (Uschi Backes-Gellner and co-authors)
Impact: This article shows that after the establishment of new UASs in Switzerland, profits per firm are higher in municipalities with a new UAS compared to the firms in regions without a UAS.
Social Norms and Gendered Occupational Choices of Men and Women: Time to Turn the Tide? (Patrick Lehnert, Uschi Backes-Gellner and co-authors)
Impact: The paper shows that occupational choices in Switzerland are strongly driven by regional gender norms and that these effects are even stronger for men than for women. Adolescent males in regions with stronger traditional social gender norms are much more likely to apply for gender-typical male occupations in comparison to males in regions with stronger gender equality norms. In contrast, adolescent females are more independent from traditional gender norms and are in general more open to gender atypical occupations than men. The results underscore the importance of gender equality policies that encourage adolescent males to reconsider traditional norms and atypical occupational choices in order to improve oc-cupational matching and to reduce gender differences in the labor market. The study thus provides important guidance for educational policy makers and firms that help to reduce gender inequalities in the labor market.
The value of specific skills under shock: High risks and high returns (Uschi Backes-Gellner and co-authors)
Impact: The paper shows that workers with specific skills profit more from positive demand shocks due to globalization than workers with general skills; but with negative demand shocks workers with specific skills are faced with larger earnings losses. Thus there are important trade-offs in designing occupational curricula that are important to know for educational policy makers and for individuals’ occupational choices.
Does updating education curricula accelerate technology adoption in the workplace? Evidence from dual vocational education and training curricula in Switzerland (Uschi Backes-Gellner and co-authors)
Impact: The paper studies the effects of a first wave of digitalization in the 1990s in which three new technologies CNC (computerized numerical control), CAD (computer-aided design) & DP (desktop publishing) were introduced into dual vocational education & training curricula. It finds that firms who train in occupations with updated curricula are 12 percentage points more likely to use CNC, CAD or DP in the workplace when the first graduates are available. The updating of VET curricula helps to speed up the diffusion of digital technologies. The diffusion effect is strongest in mainstream firms (i.e., SMEs that are not at the innovation frontier) who make the greatest strides in catching up to the innovation frontier after the curricula updates. Thus, systematic educational updates with digital skills for middle-skill occupations act as an effective diffusion device and can help to bring the latest digital technologies into firms’ workplaces. The study provides important insights for educational policy makers that design educational curricula in times of fast technological changes and digitalization.
Mystery Shopping als Teil der Compliance (Thorsten Hens and co-authors)
DebtRank: Too Central to Fail? Financial Networks, the FED and Systemic Risk (Stefano Battiston and co-authors)
Gutachten zur Überprüfung des Kapitalisierungszinssatzes KS 28 (Alexander Wagner and co-authors)
The Implementation of Central Bank Policy in China: The Roles of Commercial Bank Ownership and CEO Faction Membership (Prof. Michel Habib and co-authors)
A Legal Framework for Artificial Intelligence (Abraham Bernstein and co-authors)
Impact: The paper is currently being used to shape Swiss policy making for AI, has been presented to federal parliaments and cited in parliamentary motions.
Advisory Service Support that Works: Enhancing Service Quality with a Mixed-reality System (Gerd Schwabe and co-authors)
