Contributions in Merlin

Le document met la discussion des réserves transférables en relation avec l'exigence politique que les réserves légales minimales soient fixées par canton. A ce propos, il montre l'évolution de la régulation des réserves des 13 dernières années et met en évidence l'augmentation du risque qui y est lié et que l'OFSP a pris en compte de manière quelque peu négligente. Ce document prouve aussi pourquoi l'exigence de réserves cantonales est en contradiction la plus fondamentale avec l'actuariat, base des affaires d'assurance. La discussion des avantages et des inconvénients des réserves transférables fait ressortir que celles-ci posent également de nombreuses questions et troubleraient encore davantage le marché déjà fortement ébranlé. Mais afin de satisfaire tout de même au mandat du conseil d'administration, un modèle de transférabilité interne à la caisse est développé à l'alinéa 4.2.6. et une autre idée est esquissée à l'alinéa 5. Tous deux pourraient contribuer à désamorcer la discussion en matière de réserves cantonales.

We study the effects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transformation. To guide empirical work, we present a simple model where the effect of agricultural productivity on industrial development depends on the factor bias of technical change. We test the predictions of the model by studying the introduction of genetically engineered soybean seeds in Brazil, which had heterogeneous effects on agricultural productivity across areas with different soil and weather characteristics. We find that technical change in soy production was strongly labor saving and led to industrial growth, as predicted by the model.

This paper studies the optimal design of dynamic research contests. We introduce interim transfers, which are paid in every period while the contest is ongoing, to an otherwise standard setting. We show that a contest where: (i) the principal can stop the contest in any period, (ii) a constant interim transfer is paid to agents in each period while the contest is ongoing, and (iii) a final prize is paid once the principal stops the contest, is optimal for the principal and implements the first-best.

This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students' grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor's gender, we find that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues. This bias is driven by male students' evaluations, is larger for mathematical courses and particularly pronounced for junior women. The gender bias in teaching evaluations we document may have direct as well as indirect effects on the career progression of women by affecting junior women's confidence and through the reallocation of instructor resources away from research and towards teaching.

This paper analyzes the developmental origins and the evolution of health, cognitive, and socio-emotional skills during early childhood, from age 0 to 5. We explicitly model the dynamic interactions of health with the child’s behavior and cognitive skills, as well as the role of parental investment. A dynamic factor model corrects for the presence of measurement error in the proxy for the latent traits. Using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), we find that children’s capabilities strongly interact and build on each other: health is an important determinant of early socio-emotional development; in turn socio-emotional skills have a positive impact on the evolution of both health and cognitive functions; on the other side, the effect of cognitive abilities on health is negligible. Furthermore, all facets of human capital display a high degree of persistence. Finally, mother’s investments are an important determinant of the child’s health, cognitive, and socio-emotional development early in life.

This paper studies fictitious play in networks of noncooperative two-person games. We show that continuous-time fictitious play converges to the set of Nash equilibria if the overall n-person game is zero-sum. Moreover, the rate of convergence is 1/T, regardless of the size of the network. In contrast, arbitrary n-person zero-sum games with bilinear payoff functions do not possess the continuous-time fictitious-play property. As extensions, we consider networks in which each bilateral game is either strategically zero-sum, a weighted potential game, or a two-by-two game. In those cases, convergence requires a condition on bilateral payoffs or, alternatively, that the network is acyclic. Our results hold also for the discrete-time variant of fictitious play, which implies, in particular, a generalization of Robinson's theorem to arbitrary zero-sum networks. Applications include security games, conflict networks, and decentralized wireless channel selection.

We study production networks where firms’ products can be described by a set of input and output characteristics, and links are formed only if the output characteristics of a seller match the input characteristics of a customer. We introduce a fully endogenous network formation model with monopolistically competitive firms, in which firms exit due to exogenous shocks, or the propagation of shocks through the network. Firms can replace suppliers they have lost due to exit subject to switching costs and search frictions. This enables us to study the impact of shocks on aggregate production in an adaptive network, and we show that depending on the nature of the shocks, adaptivity can make the network more or less stable.

This paper deals with certain estimation problems involving the covariance matrix in large dimensions. Due to the breakdown of finite-dimensional asymptotic theory when the dimension is not negligible with respect to the sample size, it is necessary to resort to an alternative framework known as large-dimensional asymptotics. Recently, Ledoit and Wolf (2015) have proposed an estimator of the eigenvalues of the population covariance matrix that is consistent according to a mean-square criterion under large-dimensional asymptotics. It requires numerical inversion of a multivariate nonrandom function which they call the QuEST function. The present paper explains how to numerically implement the QuEST function in practice through a series of six successive steps. It also provides an algorithm to compute the Jacobian analytically, which is necessary for numerical inversion by a nonlinear optimizer. Monte Carlo simulations document the effectiveness of the code.