Contributions in Merlin

The Paris agreement and the UN SDGs show the importance and necessity of sustainability. The financial sector must take its responsibility and contribute to the transition towards a sustainable economy. By interviewing Swiss retail banks and making a survey among university students, a potential gap in the sustainable investing offering and demand shall be identified. Such a gap exists and is due to the challenges which come hand in hand with the beginning of the transition to a sustainable economy. Expanding the group of survey participants and the number of retail banks interviewed would lead to more significance.

Diese Arbeit untersucht die Abhängigkeit zwischen dem Preis von Emissionsrechten der Europäischen Union und verschiedenen Anlagen in den Portfolios von Schweizer Anlegerinnen, Anlegern und Pensionskassen in der Phase 1, Phase 2 und Phase 3 des europäischen Emissionshandelssystems. Die Ergebnisse zeigen eine durchschnittliche Abhängigkeit in der Nähe von 0 über alle Phasen hinweg. Darüber hinaus werden die Zertifikate für die Eignung im Portfoliomanagement mit Hilfe verschiedener Kennzah-len betrachtet. Es wird gezeigt, dass eine Berücksichtigung davon im Portfolio von Schweizer Privaten und Pensionskassen vor allem in Phase 3 sinnvoll gewesen wäre. Bei der Rendite-, Minimum-Varianz- und Sharpe Ratio-Optimierung sind es unter-schiedliche Phasen, bei welchen die Hinzunahme in den Portfolios von Schweizer Pri-vaten und Pensionskassen von Vorteil ist.

Die vorliegende Bachelorarbeit belegt die Existenz der Low-Beta Anomalie anhand der Aktientitel des S&P 500. Unter Verwendung des Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) werden über einen 20-jährigen Betrachtungszeitraum die Aktientitel mittels der historischen Indexzusammensetzung und der Datenverfügbarkeit selektiert. Die Resultate zeigen, dass (i) das Jensen’s Alpha bei den Portfolios mit einem Beta kleiner als 1 positiv und für die Portfolios mit einem Beta grösser als 1 negativ ist und dass (ii) die tatsächliche Security Market Line (SML) flacher als die des CAPM verläuft.

This study investigates the relationship between ESG performance and firms’ financial value by using two empirical approaches based on the ESG scores: the asset pricing models (Fama French factor model), and the classical event study methodology. First, the ESG-based factor models show that adding separate E, S, and G factors into the factor model increases the explanatory power of the factor model. However, the ESG factor model shows that ‘brown’ firms overperform ‘green’ firms, but the Long-short portfolio strategy of buying the best ESG firms and short-selling the worst ESG firms brings positive cumulative returns. Second, the comparison of stock market reaction to the ESG rating changes before and after the Paris Agreement shows that ESG might be valuable information. However, the market reacts strongly negatively to ESG upgrades and weakly negatively to ESG downgrades after the PA, and the abnormal returns are statistically insignificant. This study, therefore, confirms that ESG can be a risk factor but that its profitability still lacks sufficient evidence.

Exploiting a quasi-experimental field setting, we examine whether people are outcome biased when self-evaluating their past decisions. Using data from Swiss driving license exams, we find that candidates who narrowly passed the theoretical driving exam are significantly less likely to pass the subsequent practical driving exam – which is taken several months after the theoretical exam – than those who narrowly failed. Those candidates who passed the theoretical exam on their first attempt receive more objections regarding their momentary, on-the-spot decisions in the practical exam, consistent with the idea that the underlying behavioral difference is worse preparation.

Addressing the demands of our aging society, technologies such as smart home systems enhance older adults' independence and enable them to live longer at home. Yet, older adults tend to avoid, delegate, or defer decisions, and smart home systems are rarely used by individuals over the age of 65. Drawing on research on choice overload and age labels, we investigate across four studies how the presentation of smart home systems can influence the decision-making process of older adults ages 65+ by mitigating choice complexity and, consequently, choice avoidance. We argue that age-framing of complex systems makes the choice options easier to process for older adults than does price-framing, the current market standard. We find that age-framing positively affects the rate of choice, and we identify reduced choice complexity as the underlying process. Our research further demonstrates that family members, as important co-deciders, evaluate decisions made on age-framed alternatives more positively, thus making it easier for older adults to justify their decisions. We thus contribute to research on the decision-making of older adults in general and on age labels in particular, and we identify important practical implications for providers of high investment products for older adults.

One unsolved sub-task of document analysis is mathematical formula detection (MFD). Research by ourselves and others has shown that existing MFD datasets with inline and display formula labels are small and have insufficient labeling quality. There is therefore an urgent need for datasets with better quality labeling for future research in the MFD field, as they have a high impact on the performance of the models trained on them. We present an advanced labeling pipeline and a new dataset called FormulaNet in this paper. At over 45k pages, we believe that FormulaNet is the largest MFD dataset with inline formula labels. Our experiments demonstrate substantially improved labeling quality for inline and display formulae detection over existing datasets. Additionally, we provide a math formula detection baseline for FormulaNet with an mAP of 0.754. Our dataset is intended to help address the MFD task and may enable the development of new applications, such as making mathematical formulae accessible in PDFs for visually impaired screen reader users.

null

We contribute to the literature on statistical robustness of risk measures by computing the index of qualitative robustness for risk measures based on utility functions. This problem is intimately related to finding the natural domain of finiteness and continuity of such risk measures.