Luka Petrovic, Ingo Scholtes, Counting Causal Paths in Big Time Series Data on Networks, In: ArXiv.org, No. 1905.11287, 2019. (Working Paper)
Graph or network representations are an important foundation for data mining and machine learning tasks in relational data. Many tools of network analysis, like centrality measures, information ranking, or cluster detection rest on the assumption that links capture direct influence, and that paths represent possible indirect influence. This assumption is invalidated in time-stamped network data capturing, e.g., dynamic social networks, biological sequences or financial transactions. In such data, for two time-stamped links (A,B) and (B,C) the chronological ordering and timing determines whether a causal path from node A via B to C exists. A number of works has shown that for that reason network analysis cannot be directly applied to time-stamped network data. Existing methods to address this issue require statistics on causal paths, which is computationally challenging for big data sets.
Addressing this problem, we develop an efficient algorithm to count causal paths in time-stamped network data. Applying it to empirical data, we show that our method is more efficient than a baseline method implemented in an OpenSource data analytics package. Our method works efficiently for different values of the maximum time difference between consecutive links of a causal path and supports streaming scenarios. With it, we are closing a gap that hinders an efficient analysis of big time series data on complex networks. |
|
Timothy LaRock, Vahan Nanumyan, Ingo Scholtes, Giona Casiraghi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Detecting Path Anomalies in Time Series Data on Networks, In: ArXiv.org, No. 1905.10580, 2019. (Working Paper)
The unsupervised detection of anomalies in time series data has important applications, e.g., in user behavioural modelling, fraud detection, and cybersecurity. Anomaly detection has been extensively studied in categorical sequences, however we often have access to time series data that contain paths through networks. Examples include transaction sequences in financial networks, click streams of users in networks of cross-referenced documents, or travel itineraries in transportation networks. To reliably detect anomalies we must account for the fact that such data contain a large number of independent observations of short paths constrained by a graph topology. Moreover, the heterogeneity of real systems rules out frequency-based anomaly detection techniques, which do not account for highly skewed edge and degree statistics. To address this problem we introduce a novel framework for the unsupervised detection of anomalies in large corpora of variable-length temporal paths in a graph, which provides an efficient analytical method to detect paths with anomalous frequencies that result from nodes being traversed in unexpected chronological order. |
|
Nir Jaimovich, Henry E Siu, Job polarization and jobless recoveries, In: NBER Working Paper Series, No. 18334, 2018. (Working Paper)
Job polarization refers to the shrinking share of employment in middle-skill, routine occupations experienced recently, over the last 35 years. Jobless recoveries refers to the slow rebound in aggregate employment following recent recessions, despite recoveries in aggregate output. We show how these two phenomena are related. First, essentially all employment loss in routine occupations occurs in economic downturns. Second, jobless recoveries in the aggregate can be accounted for by jobless recoveries in the routine occupations that are disappearing. |
|
Nir Jaimovich, Sergio Rebelo, Arlene Wong, Miao Ben Zhang, Trading up and the skill premium, In: NBER Working Paper Series, No. 25931, 2019. (Working Paper)
We study the impact on the skill premium of increases in the quality of goods consumed by households(“trading up”). Our empirical work shows that high- quality goods are more intensive in skilled laborthan low-quality goods and that household spending on high-quality goods rises with income. Wepropose a model consistent with these facts. This model accounts for the past rise in the skill premiumwith more plausible rates of skill-biased technical change than those required by the canonical model.It also implies that an expansion of the skilled labor force reduces the skill premium by much lessthan in the canonical model. |
|
Amalia R Miller, Ragan Petrie, Carmit Segal, Does Workplace Competition Increase Labor Supply? Evidence from a Field Experiment, In: NBER Working Paper Series, No. 25948, 2019. (Working Paper)
This paper develops a novel field experiment to test the implicit prediction of tournament theory thatcompetition increases work time and can therefore contribute to the long work hours required in eliteoccupations. A majority of workers in the treatment without explicit financial incentives worked pastthe minimum time, but awarding a tournament prize increased work time and effort by over 80% andlowered costs of effort or output by over a third. Effort was similar with alternative (piece rate, low-prizetournament) bonuses. Men worked longer than women in the high-prize tournament, but for the sameduration in other treatments. |
|
Katharina Jaik, Stefan C. Wolter, From dreams to reality: market forces and changes from occupational intention to occupational choice, In: Swiss Leading House Economics of Education Working Paper, No. 149, 2018. (Working Paper)
This study empirically investigates whether the relationship between the fraction of filled apprenticeships in a particular occupation in the past and the fraction of prospective apprentices having very early intentions to train in this occupation has an impact on the decision to change the intended choice of occupation. We use a unique dataset from Switzerland containing detailed information on students’ early occupational ‘dreams’ (ages 13-14), before they undergo intensive career counselling, and combine it with information on their ultimate choice of occupation at the end of compulsory schooling (ages 15-16). The estimation results show that although the majority of students revise their initial intentions, those students who dreamed of learning an occupation with more training positions filled in previous years than peers interested in learning this occupation have a significantly higher probability of sticking to their initial dream occupation. Conversely, students who wished to train in an overly popular occupation have a higher probability of delaying the transition to upper-secondary education for at least one year, instead of switching to another occupation. In addition, we find on an aggregated level that a favourable situation on the apprenticeship market ultimately increases the premature contract termination rate due to a person-occupation-mismatch. |
|
Tobias Schlegel, Curdin Pfister, Dietmar Harhoff, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Innovation Effects of Universities of Applied Sciences: an Assessment of Regional Heterogeneity, In: Swiss Leading House Economics of Education Working Paper, No. 161, 2019. (Working Paper)
|
|
Mathias Beck, Martin Junge, Ulrich Kaiser, Public funding and corporate innovation, In: KOF Working Papers, No. 437, 2018. (Working Paper)
We review and condense the body of literature on the economic returns of public R&D on private R&D and find that: (i)private returns to R&D appear to be large and larger than the returns to alternative investments; (ii) private R&D and R&D subsidies are positively correlated and there is no evidence for crowding out; (iii)R&D cooperation increases private R&D; (iv) there appear to exist complementarities between alternative sources of funding; (v) the mobility of R&D workers, particularly of university scientists,is positively related to innovation; (vi) there are many university spin-offs but these are no more successful than non-university spin-offs; (vii) universities constitute important collaboration partnersand (viii)clusters enhance collaboration, patents and productivity. Key problems for economic policy advice are that the identification of causal effects is problematic in most studies and that little is known about the optimal design of policy measures. |
|
Egon Franck, Markus Lang, A teoretical analysis of the influence of money injections on risk taking in Football Clubs, In: Working Paper Series, No. 160, 2013. (Working Paper)
This paper analyzes the adverse incentive effects produced by money injections of benefactors (sugar daddies SD). We show that the existence of a SD induces the club to choose a riskier investment strategy and the more the SD commits to bailout the club, the more the clubs’ optimal level of riskiness increases. Moreover, a private SD bails out the club less often than a public SD. Our model further shows that a ”too-big-to-fail” phenomenon exists because it is optimal to always bailout a club if its market size is sufficiently large. |
|
Simon Janssen, Simone Tuor Sartore, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Discriminatory social attitudes and varying gender pay gaps within firms, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 327, 2014. (Working Paper)
This study analyzes the relationship between discriminatory social attitudes and the variation of within-firm pay gaps by combining data on regional votes on gender equality laws with a data set of multi-establishments firms and their workers. The data set allows us for the first time to study gender pay gaps within the same firm across establishments located in regions with varying discriminatory social attitudes. Our results show that firms have larger pay gaps in regions with stronger discriminatory social attitudes. This result remains robust when we account for detailed worker and job characteristics and prevails for different subsamples.
Thus we show that a relationship between discriminatory social attitudes and gender pay gaps prevails even after accounting for the sorting of women and men into different firms and occupations. |
|
Egon Franck, Financial Fair Play in European Club Footbal l – what is it all about?, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 328, 2014. (Working Paper)
The new UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations have encountered stiff criticism. The concerns are that the new regulations may harm football in three different ways: By forgoing the potential benefits from substantial injections of external money into payrolls, by restricting competition in the player market without at the same time achieving benefits from more balanced competition, and by creating some sort of barrier to entry which could freeze the current hierarchy of clubs. It is the purpose of this paper to take these concerns as a starting point for discussing the likely effects of the new regulations. As a by-product it will become obvious why and in which points the concerns are unfounded. |
|
Ann-Kathrine Ejsing, Ulrich Kaiser, Hans Christian Kongsted, Keld Laursen, The role of university scientist mobility for industrial innovation, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 332, 2013. (Working Paper)
Scientific knowledge is an important ingredient in the innovation process. Drawing on the knowledge-based view of the firm and the literature on the relationship between science and technology, this paper scrutinizes the importance of university scientists’ mobility for firms’ innovative activities. Combining patent data and matched employer-employee data for Danish firms, we can track the labor mobility of R&D workers from 1999 to 2004. We find that new joiners contribute more than long-term employees to innovative activity in the focal firm. Among new firm recruits, we observe that newly hired former university researchers contribute more to innovative activity than newly hired recent graduates or joiners from firms, but only in firms with a high level of absorptive capacity in the form of recent experience of hiring university researchers. We find also that firms’ recent experience of hiring university researchers enhances the effect of newly hired recent graduates’ contributions to innovation. |
|
Jasmin Joecks, Kerstin Pull, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Childbearing and (female) research productivity – a personnel economics perspective on the leaky pipeline, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 333, 2013. (Working Paper)
Despite the fact that childbearing is time-consuming (i.e. associated with a negative resource effect), we descriptively find female researchers with children in business and economics to be more productive than female researchers without children. Hence, female researchers with children either manage to overcompensate the negative resource effect associated with childbearing by working harder (positive incentive effect), or only the most productive female researchers decide to go for a career in academia and have children at the same time (positive self-selection effect). Our first descriptive evidence on the timing of parenthood among more than 400 researchers in business and economics from Austria, Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland hints at the latter being the case: only the most productive female researchers with children dare to self-select (or are selected) into an academic career. Our results have important policy implications when it comes to reducing the “leaky pipeline” in academia. |
|
Ulrich Kaiser, Hans Christian Kongsted, Thomas Ronde, Does the mobility of R and D labor increase innovation?, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 336, 2013. (Working Paper)
We investigate the effect of mobility of highly skilled workers in Denmark on the total patenting activity of the firms involved for the population of R&D active Danish firms observed between 1999 and 2004. Our study documents how workers joining increase firms’ patenting activity. The effect is strongest if workers join from patent-active firms. We also find evidence of a positive feedback effect on patenting from workers who have left for another patent-active firm. Summing up the effects of joining and leaving workers, we show that labor mobility increases the total innovative activity of the new and the old employer. Our study thus provides firm-level support for the notion that labor mobility stimulates overall innovation of a country or region. |
|
Ulrich Kaiser, Bettina Müller, Team heterogeneity in startups and its development over time, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 337, 2013. (Working Paper)
We investigate the workforce heterogeneity of startups with respect to education, age and wages. Our explorative study uses data on the population of 1,614 Danish firms founded in 1998. We track these firms until 2001 which enables us to analyze changes in workforce composition over time. Such a dynamic analysis constitutes a hitherto neglected area of entrepreneurship research. To assess relative workforce heterogeneity, we construct a simulated benchmark to which we compare observed workforce heterogeneity. We find that the initial workforce is relatively homogeneous compared to our benchmark. Our result holds both for non-knowledge-based and, to a lesser extent, knowledge-based startups. This seems surprising since a vast management literature advocates heterogeneous teams. The difficulties associated with workforce heterogeneity (like affective confl ict or coordination cost) as well as "homophily" (peoples inclination to bound with others with similar characteristics) hence appear to generally overweigh the benefits of heterogeneity (like greater variety in perspectives or more creativity). We also document that workforces become more heterogeneous over time - startups add workers with skills different from the workforce at startup. The initial supposedly "poor" mix of workforce characteristics is hence adjusted as the startup matures. This increase in workforce heterogeneity is, however, smaller compared to our benchmark but substantially larger than is team additions had the same characteristics as the initial team members. |
|
Lukas Schönenberger, Andrea Schenker-Wicki, Can System Dynamics Learn from Social Network Analysis?, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 349, 2015. (Working Paper)
This article deals with the analysis of large or complex system dynamics (SD) models, exploring the benefits of a multimethodological approach to model analysis. We compare model analysis results from SD and social network analysis (SNA) by deploying SNA techniques on a pertinent example from the SD literature—the world dynamics model. Although SNA is a clearly distinct method from SD in that it focuses on social actors and their interrelationships, we contend that SD can indeed learn from SNA, particularly in terms of model structure analysis. Our argumentation follows renowned system dynamicists who acknowledge the potential of SD to synthesize and advance theories in social science at both the conceptual and technical levels. |
|
Helmut Max Dietl, Nicolas Schweizer, Developing a framework to identify and systematise sources of inefficiencies in sports sponsorship from a sponsee perspect, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 352, 2015. (Working Paper)
This paper develops a framework for illustrating why sponsored sports entities, the "sponsees", often struggle to achieve their sponsorship-related goals to maximise sponsorship income, to satisfy their sponsors, and to create positive image or brand effects through the sponsorship. Based on a review of existing literature and a series of interviews with experts from sponsors, sponsees, and sports agencies, we identify six sources of inefficiencies at the sponsee side that can impede the achievement of the sponsorship-related goals. We further disentangle the underlying drivers for the identified sources of inefficiencies, mainly resource constraints, capabilities and know-how issues, communication issues, and the management's "degree of professionalism". While previous research in sports sponsorship has concentrated mainly on the sponsor perspective and marginalised the sponsee perspective, we put the sponsee at the centre of our study. |
|
Katrin Hummel, Peter Ising, Earnings managment - does corporate sustainability performance matter?, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 358, 2015. (Working Paper)
This study investigates the relationship between corporate sustainability performance and earnings management practices in a European setting. We measure earnings management based on discretionary accruals (cash flow approach) and real activity management. Corporate sustainability performance is a multi-dimensional construct that is measured based on data provided by the CSRHub database. Employing a European sample of 1,426 firm-year observations, our results reveal a negative relationship between corporate sustainability performance and earnings management activities. This finding supports the notion that a broad and integrated approach of sustainability performance constrains the use of earnings management practices. The results are consistent with recent research on U.S. non-financial companies (Kim et al. 2012), indicating the application of similar principles in U.S. and European settings. Additional analyses reveal that this relationship is particularly applicable to the environmental and community dimensions of sustainability, whereas we find only limited empirical evidence on this relationship for the employee dimension. Taken together, our study provides further evidence regarding the relevance of corporate sustainability in the financial context. |
|
Leonhard Dobusch, David Seidl, Felix Werle, Opening up the strategy-making process : comparing open strategy to open innovation, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 359, 2015. (Working Paper)
In this paper we compare the emerging field of open strategy to the established field of open innovation in order to facilitate their cross-fertilisation both in research and practice. Taking a communication-centred perspective, we argue that in both fields ‘openness’ concerns opening-up the communication process towards previously excluded individuals. On the basis of our review of the literature, we introduce a general framework that distinguishes between two dimensions of openness in terms of the direction that communication takes: sharing communication content with external participants and audiences and receiving communication content from external participants and audiences. Using the two dimensions of sharing and receiving, we map documented cases of empirical research in both fields and identify different forms of openness in processes of open innovation and open strategy. As we will show, in the material that we examined, in most of the cases of open strategy sharing and receiving are combined, while in many cases of open innovation we identified only one dimension. We suggest that this difference arises because, unlike innovation, open strategy typically involves joint sensemaking and thus a bidirectional communication process. Drawing on our findings, we put forward three propositions to provide a foundation for future empirical research on phenomena of open innovation and open strategy. |
|
Uschi Backes-Gellner, Marlies Kluike, Kerstin Pull, Martin Schneider, Silvia Teuber, Human resource management and radical innovation : a fuzzy-set QCA of US multinationals in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 361, 2015. (Working Paper)
This paper explores, based on the varieties-of-capitalism approach, configurations of key human resource management practices that explain radical innovation in subsidiaries. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is conducted with data for 69 subsidiaries of US-based MNEs in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Contrary to the implications of the varieties-of-capitalism literature, combining numerical flexibility and employing a high share of academics does not necessarily achieve radical innovation. Various paths to radical innovation exist, and most of them involve functional flexibility. Overall, the findings emphasize the strategic discretion MNEs have, and accentuate that functional flexibility is a key HR practice to achieve radical innovation across differing varieties of capitalism countries. |
|