Carmen Tanner, Nicole Witt, The Many Facets of Workplace Moral Courage: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Scale, In: SSRN, No. 4670864, 2023. (Working Paper)
In the battle against unethical behavior in organizations, fostering employees' moral courage proves vital beyond conventional regulation and compliance efforts. To propel this frontier and empower individuals to uphold moral values, a robust measure of workplace moral courage becomes imperative. Drawing upon a competency-based approach, this paper introduces the Workplace Moral Courage Scale (WMCS). Unlike previous measures, the WMCS stands out by acknowledging the diverse ways in which moral courage can manifest within workplace settings. Building on data of two diverse German employee samples (total N = 995), we unveil five distinct factors: challenging colleague and supervisor misconduct, opposing unethical orders, confessing mistakes, and initiating positive changes. The WMCS exhibits good psychometric properties and convergent and discriminant validity. Confirming its concurrent validity, the WMCS effectively predicts various forms of employee silence, even after controlling for organizational influences. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results and implications of the WMCS. |
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Carmen Tanner, Ann-Sophie Groos, A Cybernetic Perspective on Escalation: Lessons from the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal, In: SSRN, No. 4191411, 2023. (Working Paper)
This paper examines how and why initially well-intentioned organizations can find themselves ethically adrift. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, we investigate what planted the seed of deception, why the company’s deceptive behavior changed from one stage to the next, and which factors catalyzed these shifts. Furthermore, we scrutinize the management’s response to the disclosure of their misconduct. We employ a cybernetic perspective, envisioning the dynamics of deception as a multi-stage, goal-directed process, in which shifts in behavior are driven by a need to resolve discrepancies between past and anticipated future states. Our analysis reveals two dominant dysfunctional feedback loops underlying the company’s ethical descent. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of this case study and derive propositions about the emergence of such dysfunctional feedback loops, as well as strategies that may help to de-escalate such situations by strengthening ethical feedback loops. |
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Johannes Katsarov, David Schmocker, Carmen Tanner, Markus Christen, Moral Sensitivity Training - A Systematic Review, In: SSRN, No. 4551778, 2023. (Working Paper)
Moral sensitivity is one of the most important educational goals in the ethical domain. This paper offers a first review of attempts to train moral sensitivity from 1979 to 2018, including 45 studies. The studies were reviewed using a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses. Our results show that longer courses are generally more successful in fostering moral sensitivity. However, this effect is relatively small. What ultimately appears to have mattered most, was whether learners received personal feedback on their awareness to ethical issues. Training methods that appeared to be of little value in promoting moral sensitivity including problem-based learning, the discussion of papers and texts (seminars) and a strong focus on critical thinking and challenging existing perspectives. A further major implication of our results is that reviews of ethics training ought to differentiate between learning outcomes (e.g., moral sensitivity vs. reasoning). |
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Michele Fenzl, Christine Stedtnitz, The news we choose: unfair inequality and the growing success of populist news, In: URPP Equality of Opportunity Discussion Paper Series, No. 23, 2023. (Working Paper)
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Delia Zollinger, David Attewell, Social networks and the education cleavage, In: URPP Equality of Opportunity Discussion Paper Series, No. 24, 2023. (Working Paper)
Education is widely recognized as structuring emerging political divides between the new left and the far right (Stubager 2009; Häusermann and Kriesi 2015; Abou-Chadi and Hix 2021; Marks et al. 2022). However, there is ongoing uncertainty about the mechanism through which the education cleavage operates, particularly in the absence of mobilizing organizations. We fielded a survey in Germany in October 2022 (to be followed by Switzerland and the UK) to explore the hypothesis that patterns of social segregation by education create social networks which foster common identities, political attitudes, and voting behavior (consolidating key aspects of an emerging cleavage). We offer descriptive evidence that individuals tend to be embedded in educationally-distinct social networks. In turn, our preliminary findings show that network composition in terms of both level and field are associated with social identities, political attitudes, and vote choice, above and beyond individual educational characteristics. |
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Stefano Battiston, Irene Monasterolo, Maurizio Montone, Technological greenness and long-run performance, In: SSRN, No. 4639787, 2023. (Working Paper)
Firms’ investments in green technology are crucial for investors’ alignment to the Net Zero target. However, it is still unclear whether firms that invest in green technologies are rewarded by the market, particularly in the long run. Using a science-based technological measure of greenness, we find that the adoption of sustainable technologies is associated with better future financial and operating performance. Firms with greener technologies do not just appeal to investors’ pro-social preferences but also represent better firms. The results are especially strong in countries characterized by higher financial development, and for firms with better climate-related disclosure. |
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Lucia Alessi, Stefano Battiston, Taxonomy-alignment and transition risk: a country-level approach, In: JRC Working Papers in Economics and Finance, No. JRC135889, 2023. (Working Paper)
When firm-level information is not available, the greenness of financial portfolios, in terms of alignment to the EU Taxonomy, and their exposure to climate-related transition risk need to be estimated with a top-down approach. We improve the accuracy of available estimates by providing country-specific coefficients for both dimensions, based on homogeneous definitions of greenness and transition risk across countries. An application on confidential data from the European Central Bank shows that the exposure to transition risk of less regulated financial institutions has more than tripled from 2014 to 2023. Moreover, we show that the levels of Taxonomy alignment and transition risk exposure are largely heterogeneous across countries and sectors. |
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Giacomo Bressan, Anja Duranovic, Irene Monasterolo, Stefano Battiston, Asset-level assessment of climate physical risk matters for adaptation finance, In: SSRN, No. 4062275, 2023. (Working Paper)
Climate physical risk assessment is crucial to inform adaptation policies and finance. However, science-based and transparent solutions to assess climate physical risks are still missing. This is a main limitation to fill the adaptation gap. We provide a methodology that quantifies physical risks on geolocalized productive assets, considering their exposure to both chronic and acute impacts (hurricanes) across the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Then, we translate asset-level shocks into economic and financial losses. We illustrate the methodology in an application to Mexico, a country that is highly exposed to physical risks, and attracts adaptation finance and foreign investments. We find that investor losses are underestimated up to 70% when neglecting asset-level information, and up to 82% when neglecting acute risks. Therefore, neglecting the asset-level and acute dimensions of physical risks can lead to large errors in the identification of the relevant adaptation policy response, investments and finance tools aimed to build resilience to climate change. |
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Irena Barjašić, Stefano Battiston, Vinko Zlatić, Credit Valuation Adjustment in Financial Networks, In: ArXiv.org, No. 2305.16434, 2023. (Working Paper)
Credit Valuation Adjustment captures the difference in the value of derivative contracts when the counterparty default probability is taken into account. However, in the context of a network of contracts, the default probability of a direct counterparty can depend substantially on the default probabilities of indirect counterparties. We develop a model to clarify when and how these network effects matter for CVA, in particular in the presence of correlation among counterparties defaults. We provide an approximate analytical solution for the default probabilities. This solution allows for identifying conditions on key parameters such as network degree, leverage and correlation, where network effects yield large differences in CVA (e.g. above 50%), and thus relevant for practical applications. Moreover, we find evidence that network effects induce a multi-modal distribution of CVA values. |
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Marc Paolella, Pawel Polak, Patrick Walker, Risk Parity Portfolio Optimization under Heavy-Tailed Returns and Time-Varying Volatility, In: SSRN, No. 4652551, 2023. (Working Paper)
Risk parity portfolio optimization, using expected shortfall as the risk measure, is investigated when asset returns are fat-tailed and heteroscedastic. The conditional return distribution is modeled by an elliptical multivariate generalized hyperbolic distribution, allowing for fast parameter estimation, via an expectation-maximization algorithm and a semi-closed form of the risk contributions. The efficient computation of non-Gaussian risk parity weights sidesteps the need for numerical simulations or Cornish-Fisher-type approximations. Accounting for fat-tailed returns, the risk parity allocation is less sensitive to volatility shocks, thereby generating lower portfolio turnover, in particular during market turmoils such as the global financial crisis. Although risk parity portfolios are surprisingly robust to the misuse of the Gaussian distribution, a more realistic model for conditional returns and time-varying volatilies can improve risk-adjusted returns, reduces turnover during periods of market stress and enables the use of a holistic risk model for portfolio and risk management. |
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Sandro Ambühl, Sebastian Blesse, Philipp Doerrenberg, Christoph Feldhaus, Axel Ockenfels, Politicians’ social welfare criteria: an experiment with German legislators, In: CESifo Working Papers, No. 10329, 2023. (Working Paper)
Much economic analysis derives policy recommendations based on social welfare criteria intended to model the preferences of a policy maker. Yet, little is known about policy maker’s normative views in a way amenable to this use. In a behavioral experiment, we elicit German legislators’ social welfare criteria unconfounded by political economy constraints. When resolving preference conflicts across individuals, politicians place substantially more importance on least-favored than on most-favored alternatives, contrasting with both common aggregation mechanisms and the equal weighting inherent in utilitarianism and the Kaldor-Hicks criterion. When resolving preference conflicts within individuals, we find no support for the commonly used “long-run criterion” which insists that choices merit intervention only if the lure of immediacy may bias intertemporal choice. Politicians’ and the public’s social welfare criteria largely coincide. |
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Larry Samuelson, Jakub Steiner, Growth and likelihood, In: CEPR Discussion Papers, No. 18339, 2023. (Working Paper)
We examine a stochastic growth process that can alternatively be interpreted as a model of economic growth, financial portfolio management, statistical inference, or biological population growth. For the economic interpretation, we find that the growth-maximizing policy satisfies a meritocracy principle: it minimizes the discrepancy between the resource shares allocated to the agents and the agents' ``merits.'' For the statistical interpretation, the setting is equivalent to a model of predictive coding, in which a misspecified system maximizes the fit of data. A consistency principle analogous to the meritocracy principle requires the optimal fit to minimize a degree of Bayes inconsistency. |
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Jiyuan Huang, Per Nils Anders Östberg, Difference-in-differences with Economic Factors and the Case of Housing Returns, In: Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper, No. 23-55, 2023. (Working Paper)
This paper studies how to incorporate observable factors in difference-in-differences and document their empirical relevance. We show that even under random assignment directly adding factors with unit-specific loadings into the difference-in-differences estimation results in biased estimates. This bias, which we term the “bad time control problem” arises when the treatment effect covaries with the factor variation. Researchers often control for factor structures by using: (i) unit time trends, (ii) pre-treatment covariates interacted with a time trend and (iii) group-time dummies. We show that all these methods suffer from the bad time control problem and/or omitted factor bias. We propose two solutions to the bad time control problem. To evaluate the relevance of the factor structure we study US housing returns. Adding macroeconomic factors shows that factors have additional explanatory power and estimated factor loadings differ systematically across geographic areas. This results in substantially altered treatment effects. |
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Daron Acemoglu, Philippe Aghion, Lint Barrage, David Hémous, Green innovation and the transition toward a clean economy, In: PIIE Working Papers, No. 23-14, 2023. (Working Paper)
To combat climate change without sacrificing long-term economic growth, innovation must be redirected toward green technologies. In this paper, we review a recent literature that has developed a directed technical change framework where innovation can be endogenously targeted either toward fossil-fuel enhancing technologies or clean energy sources (such as renewables). We provide empirical evidence of path dependence in firms’ choice between green and dirty innovation. We then draw implications of this path dependence for the design of environmental policy and for economic growth. In particular, we show that our framework has distinctive implications regarding unilateral environmental policies, international cooperation, the use of intermediate energy sources such as natural gas, and the role of civil society. |
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Iraj Khalid, Belina Rodrigues, Hippolyte Dreyfus, Solène Frileux, Karin Meissner, Philippe Fossati, Todd Anthony Hare, Liane Schmidt, Taste matters: mapping expectancy-based appetitive placebo effects onto the brain, In: bioRxiv, No. 527858, 2023. (Working Paper)
Expectancies, which are higher order prognostic beliefs, can have powerful effects on experiences, behavior and brain. However, it is unknown where, how, and when, in the brain, prognostic beliefs influence appetitive interoceptive experiences and related economic behavior. This study combined a placebo intervention on hunger with computational modelling and functional magnetic resonance imaging of value-based decision-making. The results show that prognostic beliefs about hunger shape hunger experiences, how much participants value food and food-value encoding in the prefrontal cortex. Computational modelling further revealed that these placebo effects were underpinned by how much and when during the decision process taste and health information are integrated into the accumulation of evidence toward a food choice. The drift weights of both sources of information further moderated ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex interactions during choice formation. These findings provide novel insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms that translate higher order prognostic beliefs into non-aversive interoceptive sensitivity and shape decision-making. |
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Leonardo Bursztyn, Alexander W Cappelen, Bertil Tungodden, Alessandra Voena, David Yanagizawa-Drott, How are gender norms perceived?, In: NBER Working Paper Series, No. 31049, 2023. (Working Paper)
Actual and perceived gender norms are key to understanding gender inequality in society. In this paper, using newly collected nationally representative datasets from 60 countries that cover over 80% of the world population, we study gender norms on two distinct policy issues: 1) basic rights, allowing women to work outside of the home, and 2) affirmative action, prioritizing women when hiring for leadership positions. We establish that misperceptions of gender norms are pervasive across the world. The nature of the misperception, however, is context-dependent. In less gender-equal countries, people underestimate support for both policies, particularly among men; in more gender-equal countries, people overestimate support for affirmative action, particularly among women, and underestimate support for basic rights. We provide evidence of gender stereotyping and overweighting of the minority view as potential drivers of the global patterns of misperceptions. Together, our findings indicate how misperceptions of gender norms may obstruct progress toward gender equality, but also may contribute to sustaining gender policies that are not necessarily favored by women themselves. |
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Michel Maréchal, Alain Cohn, Jeffrey Yusof, Raymond Fisman, Whose preferences matter for redistribution: cross-country evidence, In: NBER Working Paper Series, No. 31974, 2023. (Working Paper)
Using cross-sectional data from 93 countries, we investigate the relationship between the desired level of redistribution among citizens from different socioeconomic backgrounds and the actual extent of government redistribution. Our focus on redistribution arises from the inherent class conflicts it engenders in policy choices, allowing us to examine whose preferences are reflected in policy formulation. Contrary to prevailing assumptions regarding political influence, we find that the preferences of the lower socioeconomic group, rather than those of the median or upper strata, are most predictive of realized redistribution. This finding contradicts the expectations of both leading experts and regular citizens. |
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Alessandro Ferrari, Sébastien Laffitte, Mathieu Parenti, Farid Toubal, Profit shifting frictions and the geography of multinational activity, In: CEPR Discussion Papers, No. 17801, 2023. (Working Paper)
International tax rules are commonly viewed as obsolete as multinational corporations exploit loopholes to move their profits to tax havens. This paper uncovers how international tax reforms can curb profit shifting and impact real income and welfare across nations. We build a model of international corporate tax avoidance under imperfect competition that disentangles profits that stem from real economic activity from paper profits that are booked in tax havens. Our framework delivers a set of ``triangle identities'' through which we recover bilateral profit-shifting flows. Using different data sources ranging from publicly available to firm-level datasets, we find an elasticity of paper profits that is three times larger than the elasticity of the tax base. In our quantitative model, a global minimum tax increases welfare by inducing higher tax revenues and public good provision. It also encourages countries to raise their statutory corporate tax rates as it effectively reduces tax competition. Instead, a border adjustment tax (BAT) that eliminates profit shifting distorts multinational production and may result in welfare losses. A tax reform in the spirit of the destination-based cash-flow tax, combining a BAT with a reduction in the corporate income tax rate may induce efficiency gains at the expense of public good provision. |
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Elliot Beck, Damian Kozbur, Michael Wolf, Hedging Forecast Combinations With an Application to the Random Forest, In: ArXiv.org, No. 2308.15384, 2023. (Working Paper)
This papers proposes a generic, high-level methodology for generating forecast combinations that would deliver the optimal linearly combined forecast in terms of the mean-squared forecast error if one had access to two population quantities: the mean vector and the covariance matrix of the vector of individual forecast errors. We point out that this problem is identical to a mean-variance portfolio construction problem, in which portfolio weights correspond to forecast combination weights. We allow negative forecast weights and interpret such weights as hedging over and under estimation risks across estimators. This interpretation follows directly as an implication of the portfolio analogy. We demonstrate our method's improved out-of-sample performance relative to standard methods in combining tree forecasts to form weighted random forests in 14 data sets. |
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Ana Costa-Ramon, Meltem Daysal, Ana Rodríguez-González, The oral contraceptive pill and adolescents' mental health, In: CEPR Discussion Papers, No. 18269, 2023. (Working Paper)
What is the impact of the oral contraceptive pill on the mental health of adolescent girls? Using administrative data from Denmark and exploiting the variation in the timing of pill initiation in an event study design, we find that the likelihood of a depression diagnosis and antidepressant use increases shortly after pill initiation. We then uncover substantial variation in primary care providers' tendency to prescribe the pill to adolescents, unrelated to patient characteristics. Being assigned to a high prescribing physician strongly predicts pill use by age 16 and leads to worse mental health outcomes between ages 16-18. |
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