Contributions in Merlin

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We adapt the design of four experimental studies on retirement decision-making and conduct replications with a larger online sample from the broader population. We replicate most of the main effects of the original studies. In particular, we confirm that consumption decisions are less efficient when subjects need to borrow from the future than when they need to save from the present. When subjects collect retirement benefits as lump sum instead of annuities, they choose to retire later, as suggested by the original study. We also confirm that savings are higher when they are incentivized with matching contributions than when incentivized with tax rebates. However, when faced with varying survival risks, subjects in our replication make only partial adjustments to spending paths when ambiguity is reduced. We also propose a further experimental research agenda in related topics and discuss practical issues on subject recruitment, attrition, and redesign of complex tasks.

This paper examines the role of lifelong learning in counteracting skill depreciation and obsolescence. We differentiate between occupations with more hard skills versus more soft skills and draw on representative job advertisement data that contain machine-learning categorized skill requirements and cover the Swiss job market in great detail across occupations (from 1950 to 2019). We examine lifelong learning effects for “harder” versus “softer” occupations, thereby analyzing the role of training in counteracting skill depreciation in occupations that are differently affected by skill depreciation. Our results reveal novel empirical patterns regarding the benefits of lifelong learning, which are consistent with theoretical explanations based on structurally different skill depreciation rates: In harder occupations, with large shares of fast-depreciating hard skills, the role of lifelong learning is primarily as a hedge against unemployment risks rather than a boost to wages. By contrast, in softer occupations, in which workers build on more value-stable soft-skill foundations, the role of lifelong learning instead lies mostly in acting as a boost for upward career mobility and leads to larger wage gains.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) constitutes a crucial part of the European legislative framework addressing the dominance of 'Big Tech'. It intends to foster fairness and competition in Europe's digital platform economy by imposing obligations on 'gatekeepers' to share end-user-related information with business users. Yet, this may involve the processing of personal data subject to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The obligation to provide access to personal data in a GDPR-compliant manner poses a regulatory and technical challenge and can serve as a justification for gatekeepers to refrain from data sharing. In this research-in-progress paper, we analyze key tensions between the DMA and the GDPR through the paradox perspective. We argue through a task-technology fit approach how privacy-enhancing technologies-particularly anonymization techniques-and portability could help mediate tensions between data sharing and privacy. Our contribution provides theoretical and practical insights to facilitate legal compliance.

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Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, dass die Leser*innen ein tieferes Verständnis bezüglich Zombie-Unternehmen erhalten und sich deren Gefahren in der Wirtschaft bewusst werden. Im Rahmen dessen wird anfangs erklärt, welche Kennzahlen ein Zombie-Unternehmen charakterisieren, wobei im Allgemeinen gesagt werden kann, dass diese Unternehmen eine hohe Verschuldung, sowie eine geringe Rentabilität aufweisen. Dabei begünstigen finanziell schwache Banken, ein ineffizientes Insolvenzregime, sowie ein niedriges Zinsniveau und Finanzkrisen die Entstehung und Aufrechthaltung von nicht lebensfähigen Unternehmen. In den meisten Fällen betrifft dies kleine und mittlere Unternehmen mit einem Umsatz von weniger als 500 Millionen US-Dollar. Im Vergleich zu gesunden Unternehmen weisen die Zombie-Firmen eine geringere Investitionstätigkeit wie eine halb so hohe Arbeits- und Gesamtproduktivität auf. Zugleich binden sie begrenzte Ressourcen, wie Human- und Finanzkapital in der Branche, was zur Folge hat, dass gesunde Unternehmen ihr Potenzial nicht ausschöpfen können. Durch die Verzerrung des Marktes gibt es ein Überangebot, daraus resultiert eine geringere Gewinnmarge und höhere Barrieren für Markteinsteiger. Die Immobilienbranche weist mit rund acht Prozent den höchsten Anteil an Zombie-Unternehmen in der Wirtschaft auf. Viele Wissenschaftler*innen sehen mit der Verbesserung der Insolvenzreglungen und der Stabilisierung der schwachen Banken essenzielle Massnahmen, um die Entstehung beziehungsweise Aufrechthaltung der Zombie-Unternehmen zu hemmen.

We examine how education expansions affect the job opportunities for workers with and without the new education. To identify causal effects, we exploit a quasi-random establishment of Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs), bachelor-granting three-year colleges that teach and conduct applied research. By applying machine-learning methods to job advertisement data, we analyze job content before and after the education expansion. We find that, in regions with the newly established UASs, not only job descriptions of the new UAS graduates but also job descriptions of workers without this degree (i.e., middle-skilled workers with vocational training) contain more high-skill job content. This upskilling in job content is driven by an increase in high-skill R&D-related tasks and linked to employment and wage gains. The task spillovers likely occur because UAS graduates with applied research skills build a bridge between middle-skilled workers and traditional university graduates, facilitating the integration of the former into R&D-related tasks.

The number of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) available in industrial environments is growing mainly due to the evolution of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. In such a context, radio frequency spectrum sensing in industrial scenarios is one of the most interesting applications of CPS due to the scarcity of the spectrum. Despite the benefits of operational platforms, IoT spectrum sensors are vulnerable to heterogeneous malware. The usage of behavioral fingerprinting and machine learning has shown merit in detecting cyberattacks. Still, there exist challenges in terms of (i) designing, deploying, and evaluating ML-based fingerprinting solutions able to detect malware attacks affecting real IoT spectrum sensors, (ii) analyzing the suitability of kernel events to create stable and precise fingerprints of spectrum sensors, and (iii) detecting recent malware samples affecting real IoT spectrum sensors of crowdsensing platforms. Thus, this work presents a detection framework that applies device behavioral fingerprinting and machine learning to detect anomalies and classify different botnets, rootkits, backdoors, ransomware and cryptojackers affecting real IoT spectrum sensors. Kernel events from CPU, memory, network,file system, scheduler, drivers, and random number generation have been analyzed, selected, and monitored to create device behavioral fingerprints. During testing, an IoT spectrum sensor of the ElectroSense platform has been infected with ten recent malware samples (two botnets, three rootkits, three backdoors, one ransomware, and one cryptojacker) to measure the detection performance of the framework in two different network configurations. Both supervised and semi-supervised approaches provided promising results when detecting and classifying malicious behaviors from the eight previous malware and seven normal behaviors. In particular, the framework obtained 0.88–0.90 true positive rate when detecting the previous malicious behaviors as unseen or zero-day attacks and 0.94–0.96 F1-score when classifying them