 Aurore Burietz, Steven Ongena, Matthieu Picault, Taxing banks leverage and syndicated lending: A cross-country comparison, International Review of Law and Economics, Vol. 73, 2023. (Journal Article)
Between 2010 and 2012 and with bank stability as the ultimate target, five European countries implemented a tax levy on banks’ liabilities thereby decreasing the cost of equity relative to the cost of debt. Using a difference-in-differences approach we assess the impact of this tax levy on banks’ participation in the syndicated loan market. We further investigate the impact of the tax levy along bank size and capital structure. We find that banks located in countries where the tax levy was implemented supply more credit. This increase is more significant for larger lenders and banks that are more capital constrained. |
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Christian Eggenberger, Uschi Backes-Gellner, IT skills, occupation specificity and job separations, Economics of Education Review, Vol. 92, 2023. (Journal Article)
This paper examines how workers’ earnings change after involuntary job separations depending on the workers’ acquired IT skills and the specificity of their occupational training. We categorize workers’ occupational skill bundles along two independent dimensions. First, we distinguish between skill bundles that are more specific or less specific compared to the skill bundles needed in the overall labor market. Second, as digitalization becomes ever more important, we distinguish between skill bundles that contain two different types of IT skills, generic or expert IT skills. We expect that after involuntary separations, these different types of IT skills can have opposing effects, either reducing or amplifying earnings losses of workers with specific skill bundles. We find clearly opposing results for workers in specific occupations—but not in general occupations: Having more generic IT skills is positively correlated with earnings after involuntary separations, whereas more expert IT skills is negatively correlated. |
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Liudmila Zavolokina, Kilian Sprenkamp, Birgit Schenk, Citizens' expectations about achieving public value and the role of digital technologies: It takes three to tango!, In: 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, s.n., Maui, HI, 2023. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Governments across the globe are facing pressure to increase the speed of their digital transformation to meet the needs of the digital society while fulfilling their primary task of delivering public value. While researchers agree on the importance of the public sector for public value creation, recently, more and more studies have recognized the criticality of collaboration between the public and private sectors for successful public value creation. In our research, we conduct a qualitative survey. We examine the idea of collaboration between the public and the private sectors in more detail and add the citizens' perspective. We highlight the need for joint forces for optimal public value creation, identify ways to achieve this, and determine what digital technologies can support this process. |
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Kilian Sprenkamp, Joaquin Delgado Fernandez, Sven Eckhardt, Liudmila Zavolokina, Federated Learning as a Solution for Problems Related to Intergovernmental Data Sharing, In: 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2023. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
To address global problems, intergovernmental collaboration is needed. Modern solutions to these problems often include data-driven methods like artificial intelligence (AI), which require large amounts of data to perform well. However, data sharing between governments is limited. A possible solution is federated learning (FL), a decentralised AI method created to utilise personal information on edge devices. Instead of sharing data, governments can build their own models and just share the model parameters with a centralised server aggregating all parameters, resulting in a superior overall model. By conducting a structured literature review, we show how major intergovernmental data sharing challenges like disincentives, legal and ethical issues as well as technical constraints can be solved through FL. Enhanced AI while maintaining privacy through FL thus allows governments to collaboratively address global problems, which will positively impact governments and citizens. |
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Matthias Baumgartner, Daniele Dell’Aglio, Heiko Paulheim, Abraham Bernstein, Towards the Web of Embeddings: Integrating multiple knowledge graph embedding spaces with FedCoder, Journal of Web Semantics, Vol. 75, 2023. (Journal Article)
The Semantic Web is distributed yet interoperable: Distributed since resources are created and published by a variety of producers, tailored to their specific needs and knowledge; Interoperable as entities are linked across resources, allowing to use resources from different providers in concord. Complementary to the explicit usage of Semantic Web resources, embedding methods made them applicable to machine learning tasks. Subsequently, embedding models for numerous tasks and structures have been developed, and embedding spaces for various resources have been published. The ecosystem of embedding spaces is distributed but not interoperable: Entity embeddings are not readily comparable across different spaces. To parallel the Web of Data with a Web of Embeddings, we must thus integrate available embedding spaces into a uniform space. Current integration approaches are limited to two spaces and presume that both of them were embedded with the same method — both assumptions are unlikely to hold in the context of a Web of Embeddings. In this paper, we present FedCoder— an approach that integrates multiple embedding spaces via a latent space. We assert that linked entities have a similar representation in the latent space so that entities become comparable across embedding spaces. FedCoder employs an autoencoder to learn this latent space from linked as well as non-linked entities. Our experiments show that FedCoder substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches when faced with different embedding models, that it scales better than previous methods in the number of embedding spaces, and that it improves with more graphs being integrated whilst performing comparably with current approaches that assumed joint learning of the embeddings and were, usually, limited to two sources. Our results demonstrate that FedCoder is well adapted to integrate the distributed, diverse, and large ecosystem of embeddings spaces into an interoperable Web of Embeddings. |
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Mateusz Dolata, Kevin Crowston, Gerhard Schwabe, Project Archetypes: A Blessing and a Curse for AI Development, In: International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2022, Association for Information Systems, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Software projects rely on what we call project archetypes, i.e., pre-existing mental images of how projects work. They guide distribution of responsibilities, planning, or expectations. However, with the technological progress, project archetypes may become outdated, ineffective, or counterproductive by impeding more adequate approaches. Understanding archetypes of software development projects is core to leverage their potential. The development of applications using machine learning and artificial intelligence provides a context in which existing archetypes might outdate and need to be questioned, adapted, or replaced. We analyzed 36 interviews from 21 projects between IBM Watson and client companies and identified four project archetypes members initially used to understand the projects. We then derive a new project archetype, cognitive computing project, from the interviews. It can inform future development projects based on AI-development platforms. Project leaders should proactively manage project archetypes while researchers should investigate what guides initial understandings of software projects. |
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Nora Varesco Kager, Jennifer Sparr, Gudela Grote, Looking for Guidance? Five Principles for Leveraging Tensions in Corporate–Startup Collaboration, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 58 (4), 2022. (Journal Article)
Corporate–startup collaboration (CSC) allows the co-development of innovations for pressing societal needs. Paradoxically, CSC is both fueled and challenged by diverging interests and approaches of the unequal actors. We apply a paradox lens to better understand the complex collaborative demands of CSC from the perspective of the corporate actors involved. Over the course of three years, we conducted 52 contextualized semi-structured interviews in a corporate-sponsored accelerator pursuing sustainability improvements. We identify five CSC paradoxes, which we translate into guiding principles for managing such paradoxes with a both/and mindset. Further, we show how these guiding principles help to address interdependencies between the CSC paradoxes. By disentangling the inherently paradoxical nature of the collaborative demands, we contribute to a fuller theoretical understanding of how organizational actors can manage these demands. We encourage companies engaging in CSC to use the guiding principles for empowering organizational actors’ understanding and approaches to CSC paradoxes. |
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Neshat Alili, The Impact of the Ukraine-Russian conflict of 2022 to the US and EU banking sector, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)
The Russia-Ukraine war started on February 24, 2022. Its prelude and the actual war had differing effects on the US and European Bank Holding Companies. In this analysis we use the event study methodology to assess the effect of five different war related events on the investor’s behavior with regards to US and European based BHCs. For our analysis we use financial indicators to give information about the investor’s behavior. The outcome shows mixed results with a more significant impact in the European than in the US based BHCs. Overall, the statistical analysis shows that the conflict remains a potential source for affecting investors. While the US based BHCs seem to be insulated from the war and the imposed sanctions, the European based BHCs are more affected. The surprising part of the results is that the investors do not seem to demonstrate concern in their expectations, a factor which seems to be similar for the BHCs of both regions. |
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Charlotte Clara Becker, Eldad Davidov, Jan Cieciuch, René Algesheimer, Martin Kindschi, Values and Attitudes Toward Immigrants Among School Children in Switzerland and Poland, Race and Social Problems, Vol. 14 (4), 2022. (Journal Article)
Research on key determinants of negative attitudes toward immigration has often suggested that values held by individuals systematically explain such sentiments. Universalists appear to have more positive and conservatives more negative attitudes. So far, however, these insights are based on studies using adult samples. In our study, we analyze these relations among children and adolescents. For the analysis, we utilized a Swiss-Polish panel dataset (2015–2017, N = 5,332) with three time points collected among school children aged 8–19 years. We employed autoregressive cross-lagged models. The results indicated that while universalism decreased negative attitudes toward immigrants, the expected effect for conformity-tradition was not found. |
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Miriam Koomen, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Occupational tasks and wage inequality in West Germany: A decomposition analysis, Labour Economics, Vol. 79, 2022. (Journal Article)
We study the role of occupational tasks as drivers of West German wage inequality. We match administrative wage data with longitudinal task data, which allow us to account for within-occupation changes in task content over time. We run RIF regression-based decompositions to quantify the contribution of changes in the returns to tasks to overall changes in the wage distribution from 1978 to 2006. We find that changes in the returns to tasks explain up to half of the increase in wage inequality since the 1990s, both at the top and the bottom of the wage distribution. Specifically, abstract tasks drive the upper wage gap, while interactive and routine tasks drive the lower wage gap. Importantly, we find low-wage occupations to have the highest routine task intensity. The association between occupational tasks and West German wage inequality is thus both stronger and different than prior research has found. |
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Simone Giansante, Mahmoud Fatouh, Steven Ongena, The asset reallocation channel of quantitative easing. The case of the UK, Journal of Corporate Finance, Vol. 77, 2022. (Journal Article)
We investigate the impact of the Bank of England's asset purchase program (APP) on the composition of assets of UK banks with unique data on the received reserves injections. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) didn’t expect there to be strong transmission of the APP’s impact through the bank lending channel. We find that compared to the control group, treated banks reallocated their assets towards lower risk-weighted investments, such as government securities, but did not provide more credit to the real economy. Overall, our findings suggest that when banks are not adequately capitalised, risk-based capital constraints can limit the effectiveness of expansionary unconventional monetary policies and provide incentives for carry trade activities. |
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Deborah Kalte, Political Consumer Gap between Foreign Residents and Swiss Citizens: The Explanatory Relationship of Political Resources and Citizenship Status, Swiss Political Science Review = Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, Vol. 28 (4), 2022. (Journal Article)
In most Western democracies, non-institutionalized political activities such as political consumerism often represent the only accessible means of political expression for foreign residents. However, the few studies available to date show that foreign residents consume significantly less politically than national citizens. This study examines how the key political resources education, political interest, and organization membership may account for this gap. By means of original survey data from Switzerland, I find that (i) organization membership is the strongest predictor for political consumerism but does not explain the participation gap; (ii) political interest is the most important resource to explain why foreign residents consume less politically than Swiss citizens; and (iii) the three resources work similarly for both groups, whereas political interest and education act as partial mediators. The results of this study suggest that political resources mediate rather than moderate political consumer differences based on citizenship status. |
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Aleksandra Urman, Mykola Makhortykh, Roberto Ulloa, Auditing the representation of migrants in image web search results, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, Vol. 9 (1), 2022. (Journal Article)
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. |
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Anja Schulze, Stefano Brusoni, How dynamic capabilities change ordinary capabilities: Reconnecting attention control and problem‐solving, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 43 (12), 2022. (Journal Article)
Research Summary
Building on the attention-based view of the firm, we elaborate the concept of dynamic capabilities and identify two constitutive elements: attention control and problem-solving. We show empirically that the control element of dynamic capabilities regulates how organizations (dis-)engage attention on operational versus change-oriented tasks. On this basis, we develop a process model of how control and problem-solving interact to reconfigure resources and thus modify ordinary capabilities. We study the adoption of lean management in the R&D unit of a large U.S. corporation. Our longitudinal case study identifies obstacles that organizations have to overcome to establish effective dynamic capabilities that enable their adaptation to changing environmental circumstances.
Managerial Summary
“The vast majority of all change initiatives fail”: We hear this statement a lot in our interactions with practitioners. In this article, we suggest an explanation of why achieving persistent, behavioral change is hard: attention to change processes is difficult to maintain over an extended period of time. Initiatives start, then fade away. By studying the interplay of control mechanisms (that keep organizational attention on the long-term goals) and problem-solving tools (that identify what and how to change in the short term), we provide a framework that can generate actionable implications for executives. In particular, we focus on the decisive and yet underestimated role played by key performance indicators in sustaining attention on change initiatives. |
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Christoffer Kok, Carola Müller, Steven Ongena, Cosimo Pancaro, The Disciplining Effect of Supervisory Scrutiny in the EU-Wide Stress Test, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Vol. forthcoming, 2022. (Journal Article)
Relying on confidential supervisory data related to the 2016 EU-wide stress test, this paper presents novel empirical evidence that supervisory scrutiny associated to stress testing has a disciplining effect on bank risk. We find that banks that participated in the 2016 EU-wide stress test subsequently reduced their credit risk relative to banks that were not part of this exercise. Relying on new metrics for supervisory scrutiny that measure the quantity, potential impact, and duration of interactions between banks and supervisors during the stress test, we find that the disciplining effect is stronger for banks subject to more intrusive supervisory scrutiny during the exercise. We also find that a strong risk management culture is a prerequisite for the supervisory scrutiny to be effective. Finally, we show that a similar disciplining effect is not exerted neither by higher capital charges nor by more transparency and related market discipline induced by the stress test. |
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Urban Ulrych, Nikola Vasiljevic, Global Currency Hedging with Ambiguity, In: Brown Bad Lunch Seminar. 2022. (Conference Presentation)
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Giulia Crestini, Andrea Giuffredi-Kähr, Radu Petru Tanase, Martin Natter, Does Pricing Transparency Benefit or Harm the Retailer-Customer Relationship?, In: Annual Conference of the Decision Sciences Institute. 2022. (Conference Presentation)
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Emmanuel Mamatzakis, Steven Ongena, Mike G Tsionas, The response of household debt to COVID-19 using a neural networks VAR in OECD, Empirical Economics, Vol. forthcoming, 2022. (Journal Article)
This paper investigates responses of household debt to COVID-19 related data like confirmed cases and confirmed deaths within a panel VAR framework for OECD countries. We also employ a plethora of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions as shocks. In terms of methodology, we opt for a global panel VAR (GVAR) methodology that nests underlying country VARs. In addition, as linear factor models may be unable to capture the variability in the data, we use an artificial neural network (ANN) method. The number of factors, as well as the number of intermediate layers, are determined using the marginal likelihood criterion and we estimate the GVAR with MCMC techniques. Results reveal that household debt positively responds to COVID-19 infections and mortality as well as lockdowns, though this response is valid in the short term. However, vaccinations and testing appear to negatively affect household debt. Lockdown measures such as stay-at-home advice, and closing schools, all have a positive impact on household debt in GVAR, though of transitory nature. |
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Silke Adam, Aleksandra Urman, Dorothee Arlt, Teresa Gil-Lopez, Mykola Makhortykh, Michaela Maier, Media Trust and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis of Short-Term Trust Changes, Their Ideological Drivers and Consequences in Switzerland, Communication Research, 2022. (Journal Article)
We analyze short-term media trust changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, their ideological drivers and consequences based on panel data in German-speaking Switzerland. We thereby differentiate trust in political information from different types of traditional and non-traditional media. COVID-19 serves as a natural experiment, in which citizens’ media trust at the outbreak of the crisis is compared with the same variables after the severe lockdown measures were lifted. Our data reveal that (1) media trust is consequential as it is associated with people’s willingness to follow Covid-19 regulations; (2) media trust changes during the pandemic, with trust levels for most media decreasing, with the exception of public service broadcasting; (3) trust losses are hardly connected to ideological divides in Switzerland. Our findings highlight that public service broadcasting plays an exceptional role in the fight against a pandemic and that contrary to the US, no partisan trust divide occurs. |
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Pavlína Wurzelová, Gül Çalikli, Alberto Bacchelli, Interpersonal Conflicts During Code Review, In: 25th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing, ACM, New York, USA, 2022. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Code review consists of manual inspection, discussion, and judgment of source code by developers other than the code's author. Due to discussions around competing ideas and group decision-making processes, interpersonal conflicts during code reviews are expected. This study systematically investigates how developers perceive code review conflicts and addresses interpersonal conflicts during code reviews as a theoretical construct. Through the thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 22 developers, we confirm that conflicts during code reviews are commonplace, anticipated and seen as normal by developers. Even though conflicts do happen and carry a negative impact for the review, conflicts-if resolved constructively-can also create value and bring improvement. Moreover, the analysis provided insights on how strongly conflicts during code review and its context (i.e., code, developer, team, organization) are intertwined. Finally, there are aspects specific to code review conflicts that call for the research and application of customized conflict resolution and management techniques, some of which are discussed in this paper. Data and material: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5848794 |
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