Contributions in Merlin

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of neutral and investmentspecific technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To achieve this, we estimate the model’s posterior density using Bayesian methods. Within this framework we first extend Ireland’s (2001, 2004) hybrid estimation approach to allow for a vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) process to describe the movements and comovements of the model’s errors not explained by the basic RBC model. Our main findings for the model with neutral technical change are: (i) the VARMA specification of the errors significantly improves the hybrid model’s fit to the historical data relative to the VAR and AR alternatives; and (ii) despite setting the RBC model a more difficult task under the VARMA specification, neutral technology shocks are still capable of explaining a significant share of the observed variation in output and its components over shorter- and longer-forecast horizons as well as hours at shorter horizons. When the hybrid model is extended to incorporate investment shocks, we find that: (iii) the VAR specification is preferred to the alternatives; and (iv) the model’s ability to explain fluctuations improves considerably.

Purpose: The governance structure of monasteries is analyzed to gain new insights and apply them to solve agency problems of modern corporations. In a historic analysis of crises and closures we ask, if Benedictine monasteries were and are capable of solving agency problems. The analysis shows that monasteries established basic governance instruments very early and therefore were able to survive for centuries. Design/methodology/approach: We use a dataset of all Benedictine abbeys that ever existed in Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and German-speaking Switzerland to determine their lifespan and the reasons for closures. The governance mechanisms are analyzed in detail. Finally, we draw conclusions relevant to the modern corporation. The theoretical foundations are based upon principal agency theory, psychological economics, as well as embeddedness theory. Findings: The monasteries that were examined show an average lifetime of almost 500 years and only a quarter of them dissolved as a result of agency problems. We argue that this success is due to an appropriate governance structure that relies strongly on internal control mechanisms. Research limitations/implications: Benedictine monasteries and stock corporations differ fundamentally regarding their goals. Additional limitations of the monastic approach are the tendency to promote groupthink, the danger of dictatorship and the life long commitment. Practical implications: The paper adds new insights into the corporate governance debate designed to solve current agency problems and facilitate better control. Originality/value: By analyzing monasteries, a new approach is offered to understand the efficiency of internal behavioral incentives and their combination with external control mechanisms in corporate governance.

I study the effect of an increase in financial incentives for firms to hire disabled workers in the context of an employment quota. My results suggest that this increase had a positive impact on firms' demand for disabled workers.

In many countries environmental policies and regulations are implemented to improve environmental quality and thus individuals’ well-being. However, how do individuals value the environment? In this paper, we review the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) representing a new non-market valuation technique. The LSA builds on the recent development of subjective well-being research in economics and takes measures of reported life satisfaction as an empirical approximation to individual welfare. Micro-econometric life satisfaction functions are estimated taking into account environmental conditions along with income and other covariates. The estimated coefficients for the environmental good and income can then be used to calculate the implicit willingness-to-pay for the environmental good.

Functional neuroimaging investigations in the fields of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics indicate that the anterior insular cortex (AI) is consistently involved in empathy, compassion, and interpersonal phenomena such as fairness and cooperation. These findings suggest that AI plays an important role in social emotions, hereby defined as affective states that arise when we interact with other people and that depend on the social context. After we link the role of AI in social emotions to interoceptive awareness and the representation of current global emotional states, we will present a model suggesting that AI is not only involved in representing current states, but also in predicting emotional states relevant to the self and others. This model also proposes that AI enables us to learn about emotional states as well as about the uncertainty attached to events, and implies that AI plays a dominant role in decision making in complex and uncertain environments. Our review further highlights that dorsal and ventro-central, as well as anterior and posterior subdivisions of AI potentially subserve different functions and guide different aspects of behavioral regulation. We conclude with a section summarizing different routes to understanding other people's actions, feelings and thoughts, emphasizing the notion that the predominant role of AI involves understanding others' feeling and bodily states rather than their action intentions or abstract beliefs.

Billions of dollars are now spent annually in the United States and Europe for spatially delineated environmental services such as agricultural landscape management and river restoration programs, yet little is known about the spatial distribution of the benefits from these policies. This paper develops a framework for recovering information on this question from the spatial pattern of votes cast for referenda on the provision of spatially delineated public goods. We specify a model linking voter support for environmental improvement to the distance at which such improvements are expected to occur. The empirical application is to a river restoration referendum in the Swiss canton of Bern. Our results indicate that the benefits from river restoration have a strong local component, sufficiently strong that voter approval would not occur if only canton-wide benefits were at stake. Surprisingly, support for river restoration is no greater, and in some specifications is actually lower, in locations where rivers are a prominent feature in the environment.

Little is known about the neural networks supporting value computation during complex social decisions. We investigated this question using functional magnetic resonance imaging while subjects made donations to different charities. We found that the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) correlated with the subjective value of voluntary donations. Furthermore, the region of the VMPFC identified showed considerable overlap with regions that have been shown to encode for the value of basic rewards at the time of choice, suggesting that it might serve as a common valuation system during decision making. In addition, functional connectivity analyses indicated that the value signal in VMPFC might integrate inputs from networks, including the anterior insula and posterior superior temporal cortex, that are thought to be involved in social cognition.

The processing of visual and haptic inputs, occurring either separately or jointly, is crucial for everyday-life object recognition, and has been a focus of recent neuroimaging research. Previously, visuohaptic convergence has been mostly investigated with matching-task paradigms. However, much less is known about visuohaptic convergence in the absence of additional task demands. We conducted two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments in which subjects actively touched and/or viewed unfamiliar object stimuli without any additional task demands. In addition, we performed two control experiments with audiovisual and audiohaptic stimulation to examine the specificity of the observed visuohaptic convergence effects. We found robust visuohaptic convergence in bilateral lateral occipital cortex and anterior cerebellum. In contrast, neither the anterior cerebellum nor the lateral occipital cortex showed any involvement in audiovisual or audiohaptic convergence, indicating that multisensory convergence in these regions is specifically geared to visual and haptic inputs. These data suggest that in humans the lateral occipital cortex and the anterior cerebellum play an important role in visuohaptic processing even in the absence of additional task demands.

Controlled Legal German (CLG) is a subset of legal German specifically designed to facilitate the automated semantic processing of Swiss statutes and regulations. This paper describes the methods CLG uses to reduce ambiguity and underspecification in order to ensure that statutes and regulations can be deterministically translated into formal logical representations. CLG aims at bridging the gap between legal texts, written in natural language, and knowledge-based legal information systems, operating on the basis of formal logical representations.