Contributions in Merlin

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.

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. Keywords:

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.