Michael Nadig, Trust Formation in Financial Advisory Services with Conversational Agents, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)
 
More and more large technology companies have developed their conversational agents and made them more popular as they advanced. The advancements are far from over and there are many improvements to be made. The Information Management Research Group of the University of Zurich has developed its own conversational agent with multiple external partners. The project is called Heinzelmännli and the prototype in this thesis is called Mo. Mo is used specifically in financial consultations. Trust is a large proponent of financial services which is why it is important to explore the impact of Mo on the trust in those services. This thesis explores the trust relations and the impact on trust Mo has in those financial consultations, but also the optimal autonomy of Mo regarding trust. Experiments were conducted in two Swiss banks where insights were gathered. Through those insights, results are observed and discussed in this thesis to answer questions regarding the impact on trust, as well as the autonomy of Mo. |
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Simon Hediger, New Methods for Testing, Prediction, and Estimation with Applications to Finance, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Dissertation)

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Filip Golubovic, Do price changes in the real estate market affect banks' stock performance? Compqarison between banks in the U.S., the euro area, and Switzerland, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)

By analyzing the changes in the residential real estate market, including the U.S., the euro area, and Switzerland, analyses are performed to establish a link between two important industries. A contribution to the literature is a comparison between the three regions of primary interest. Including the exogenous shock from the Covid-19 pandemic enriches the study from an additional perspective. Using various quantitative models for panel data regressions on a combined and individual region level, the Fixed Effects model suggests a positive relation between the price changes in residential real estate and changes in the stock prices of individual banks in the U.S. and the euro area. No evidence of a relationship in the Swiss market is found. Including the Covid-19 pandemic as a unique situation, further insights are observable. The Covid-19 period suggests a statistically significant higher effect on the relationship than before the pandemic for the U.S. and the euro area market. In contrast, for the Swiss market, the opposite effect is observed. Nevertheless, controlling for macroeconomic changes, market variations, and bank-specific variables, only correlations can be justified by the results. Due to endogeneity concerns, no causal relationship can be derived from the underlying data and methodology applied to the study. In section 1, an introduction introduces the hypotheses tested and the main idea. Section 2 represents the literature review, where the most critical findings of other published papers are presented and majorly impact the work. Further, an overview of essential variables for the analyses is displayed in section 3, followed by an explanation of the data used for the analyses and the methodology applied to all the analyses in section 4. Section 5 presents the main results and the findings, whereas section 6 rounds up the thesis with a meaningful conclusion. In the end, in section 7, there is an insight into the limitations of the work and an outlook for future potential research in this direction.
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Sharon Vögeli, Digital Mergers & Acquisitions: Characteristics and Performance, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)

Enhancing technological capabilities has become integral to a company’s international competitiveness, leading to mergers and acquisitions to access external knowledge of digital technologies. Using the event study method, the post-acquisition performance of acquirers involved in digital mergers and acquisitions in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria compared to the UK is analyzed. The findings suggest that short-term average abnormal returns are significantly positive, while long-term average abnormal returns are significantly negative. Additionally, various performance determinants are considered to evaluate investor reactions to deal announcements. The thesis contributes to the academic knowledge of European digital mergers and acquisitions performance. |
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Stefan Lamberg, The influence of ECB and SNB announcements on the Euro-Swiss Franc exchange rate , University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Bachelor's Thesis)

This paper analyzes high-frequency exchange rate movements of the euro
Swiss franc exchange rate in response to monetary policy announcements by
the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank. Thereby, the general
e↵ect, the comparison between banks and di↵erent types of monetary
policy (conventional/unconventional), and market efficiency are examined.
The data show that announcements by the two central banks significantly
impact the EUR/CHF exchange rate from 15 minutes before to 1 hour after
the announcement, with the first minute after the announcement triggering
the most significant reactions, which illustrates the high efficiency of the foreign
exchange market. No significant di↵erences were found between the ECB
and SNB announcements. Reactions to unconventional announcements have
a higher standard deviation than conventional announcements and therefore
have significant e↵ects more often. However, these are not detectable in a
mean value observation. |
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Stefan Lamberg, The influence of ECB and SNB announcements on the Euro-Swiss Franc exchange rate , University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Bachelor's Thesis)

This paper analyzes high-frequency exchange rate movements of the euro
Swiss franc exchange rate in response to monetary policy announcements by
the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank. Thereby, the general
e↵ect, the comparison between banks and di↵erent types of monetary
policy (conventional/unconventional), and market efficiency are examined.
The data show that announcements by the two central banks significantly
impact the EUR/CHF exchange rate from 15 minutes before to 1 hour after
the announcement, with the first minute after the announcement triggering
the most significant reactions, which illustrates the high efficiency of the foreign
exchange market. No significant di↵erences were found between the ECB
and SNB announcements. Reactions to unconventional announcements have
a higher standard deviation than conventional announcements and therefore
have significant e↵ects more often. However, these are not detectable in a
mean value observation. |
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Michele Pelli, Essays on Unconventional Central Bank Policies, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Dissertation)

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Charles Barbizet, Deep Learning in Corporate Bonds Pricing, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2022. (Master's Thesis)

The model and the approach developed by Chen et al. (2019) are replicated and adapted to the
framework of corporate bond expected returns. It relies on machine learning methods and estimates
the stochastic discount factor for a set of U.S. corporate bonds using macroeconomic, firm-specific
and debt-specific data.
The thesis finds that accessing corporate bond data over a long period of time can prove challenging
but when the negative effect of limited data is ignored, the model seems to perform even better on
corporate bond data than on equity data.
Furthermore, the thesis studies the predictive power of each type of input. It confirms that the
handling of the macroeconomic data suggested by Chen et al. improve the performances. In
addition, it shows that debt-specific data have strong predictive power while firm-specific data
have predictive power, it does not bring incremental predictive power to the debt-specific data. |
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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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Marek Pycia, M Utku Ünver, Outside options in neutral allocation of discrete resources, Review of Economic Design, Vol. 26 (4), 2022. (Journal Article)
 
Serial dictatorships have emerged as the canonical simple mechanisms in the literature on the allocation of indivisible goods without transfers. They are the only neutral and group-strategy-proof mechanisms in environments in which agents have no outside options and hence no individual rationality constraints (Svensson in Soc Choice Welfare 16:557–567, 1999). Accounting for outside options and individual rationality constraints, our main result constructs the class of group-strategy-proof, neutral, and non-wasteful mechanisms. These mechanisms are also Pareto efficient and we call them binary serial dictatorships. The abundance of the outside option - anybody who wants can opt out to get it - is crucial for our result. |
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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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Chayakrit Krittanawong, Neil Sagar Maitra, Hafeez Ul Hassan Virk, Sonya Fogg, Zhen Wang, David Gritsch, Eric A Storch, Philippe Tobler, Dennis S Charney, Glenn N Levine, The reply, American Journal of Medicine, Vol. 135 (12), 2022. (Journal Article)
 
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Christian Ewerhart, Mathias Hoffmann, Hans-Joachim Voth, Nobelpreis 2022: von Banken und Krisen, Die Volkswirtschaft, Vol. 96, 2022. (Journal Article)
 
Wann die nächste Finanzkrise kommt, lässt sich kaum vorhersagen. Wie man in einer solchen richtig reagiert, hingegen schon. Der diesjährige Nobelpreis ehrt drei Ökonomen für ihre Forschung zu Banken und ihrer Rolle bei der Entstehung von Finanzkrisen. |
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Jennifer Sparr, Ella Miron-Spektor, Marianne W Lewis, Wendy K Smith, From a label to a meta-theory of paradox: If we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change, Academy of Management Collections, Vol. 1 (2), 2022. (Journal Article)

Over the last 30 years, mounting insights into paradox have enabled a paradigm shift in organizational theory from linear, static, and rational toward more holistic, dynamic, and dualistic thinking. To gain insight into the nature and development of this scholarship, we curated articles from Academy of Management journals. We identified four approaches to paradox—as a label, a lens, a theory, and a metatheory. Pioneering and prototypical articles have illustrated how each approach expands our understanding of paradox, elucidating unresolved issues in and between established literatures. The collection displays both the progression of abstraction and complexity in paradox scholarship over time, and the recursive process accentuating the value of each approach and their interplay, thus offering three contributions. First, our delineation of these approaches demonstrates the development of paradox scholarship, helping scholars situate their own work in this expanding canon, while inviting new scholars to find their entry point to engage with paradox. Second, by tracking the journey from label to metatheory, we offer a model that may inform similar paths for other literatures. Third, the collection suggests that insights into paradox are fostering a paradigm shift from linear and binary toward dynamic and holistic ontologies in the organizational sciences. |
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Yue Li, Jie Hu, Christian Ruff, Xiaolin Zhou, Neurocomputational evidence that conflicting prosocial motives guide distributive justice, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 119 (49), 2022. (Journal Article)
 
In the history of humanity, most conflicts within and between societies have originated from perceived inequality in resource distribution. How humans achieve and maintain distributive justice has therefore been an intensely studied issue. However, most research on the corresponding psychological processes has focused on inequality aversion and has been largely agnostic of other motives that may either align or oppose this behavioral tendency. Here we provide behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging evidence that distribution decisions are guided by three distinct motives—inequality aversion, harm aversion, and rank reversal aversion—that interact with each other and can also deter individuals from pursuing equality. At the neural level, we show that these three motives are encoded by separate neural systems, compete for representation in various brain areas processing equality and harm signals, and are integrated in the striatum, which functions as a crucial hub for translating the motives to behavior. Our findings provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the cognitive and biological processes by which multiple prosocial motives are coordinated in the brain to guide redistribution behaviors. This framework enhances our understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying equality-related behavior, suggests possible neural origins of individual differences in social preferences, and provides a new pathway to understand the cognitive and neural basis of clinical disorders with impaired social functions. |
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