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Ana Costa-Ramón
Assistant Professor of Economics of Child and Youth Development
endowed by the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development
She is an applied microeconomist mainly interested in health, labor, and gender economics.
What are you currently working on?
In my most recent work, I study how a sudden and severe change of a child's health condition impacts parental labor market outcomes. By using long panels of high quality Finnish administrative data, I exploit variation in the exact timing of the health shock. In particular, I compare parents across families in similar parental and child age cohorts whose children experienced a health shock at different ages.
What is the main insight from this work?
I find that, following their child’s health incident, such as an illness or an accident, parental earnings suffer a decline that is both substantial and persistent. Moreover, the shock of course also impacts parents’ mental well-being.
What drew you to Switzerland and the University of Zurich?
Two things: the great faculty at the Department of Economics, and the outstanding multidisciplinary work and team involved at the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development.
What paper are you most proud of?
The first paper that I wrote during my thesis, "It's About Time: Cesarean Sections and Neonatal Health" (joint with Ana Rodríguez-González, Miquel Serra-Burriel, and Carlos Campillo-Artero), published in the Journal of Health Economics. I first started to think about this idea during my undergraduate studies when I learned in a health economics course that there was a lot of variation in the C-section rate across hospitals. After doing some research for my thesis on the topic of C-sections and realized that there was a lack of credible causal evidence on the effects of mode of delivery on children’s health. Together with my coauthors Ana Rodríguez and Miquel Serra, we thought that we could use the variation in the C-section rate to analyze this question. We managed to get data to do this study and had a great time writing the paper together!
Who inspires you?
In academia, Professor Janet Currie: her work has been essential for the field of child health and well-being. She has shown that early childhood, including the fetal period, is of great importance for the development of children’s human capital, and that programs targeting early childhood can be particularly effective in remediating childhood disadvantage.
Outside research, I’m inspired by gymnasts and dancers. I practiced rhythmic gymnastics for fifteen years. There is so much sacrifice and effort behind the beauty of their movements that they make it look like it is easy. I think that this discipline has been very important in driving how I understand and do research.
Which paper changed your view on economics?
Probably the paper by Almond, Douglas, and Janet Currie. "Killing Me Softly: The Fetal Origins Hypothesis.", published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. This paper is a literature review on the research showing that the nine months in utero are one of the most critical periods in a person’s life, shaping future educational, health, and labor trajectories. It was inspiring for me to see how creative economists have been in coming up with credible identification strategies to contribute to this literature. Much of the early evidence was mainly correlational and did not effectively address potential confounders.
Alessandro Ferrari
Assistant Professor of Economics
His research focuses on the role of firms’ behavior in shaping the macroeconomy.
What are you currently working on?
At the moment, I am studying three broad issues: firms’ choices and their macroeconomic effects, how to design economic unions of countries, like the EU or the Eurozone, and how the inability of countries to commit to trade policy may generate inefficiency during critical times like the current pandemic.
What is the main insight from this work?
My coauthors and I have recently finished a paper showing that if an economy is populated by firms wielding a lot of market power, such an economy is also more fragile to changes in the general economic situation. We think of this result as a further argument for competition policy.
What drew you to Switzerland and the University of Zurich?
A combination of the quality of the department and the impression I had of the surroundings during my visit. The Department of Economics seemed like the best place to carry out my work.
What paper are you most proud of?
So far, I would say the work that my coauthors and I have done at the intersection of industrial organization, international trade and macroeconomics. In particular, my paper with Francisco Queiros titled “Low Competition Traps” and my paper “Global Value Chains and the Business Cycle” shed light on how shocks propagate in an economy with market power and fragmented production structures.
Who inspires you?
There are a number of economists whose work I find inspiring. Working on my paper “Global Value Chains and the Business Cycle” I drew a lot of inspiration from the work of Emmanuel Farhi, Vasco Carvalho and Isabelle Mejean and their coauthors.
Which paper changed your view on economics?
Recently David Baqaee and Emmanuel Farhi’s work on disaggregated economies forced me to think deeply about issues I thought I understood.
Teodora Boneva
Assistant Professor of Economics of Child and Youth Development
endowed by the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development
Her research fields are Labor Economics and Behavioral Economics.
What are you currently working on?
I study the role of beliefs in educational investment decisions. I use novel primary data sets and a variety of different research methods such as field experiments and survey-based techniques to understand which educational interventions can promote skill acquisition and narrow socioeconomic gaps in achievement. An important part of this work is to develop new survey methods to measure individual beliefs about the benefits of different educational investments made during childhood. Understanding how individuals make educational investment decisions is crucial for our understanding of how to promote skill acquisition.
What is the main insight from this work?
Socio-economic gaps in educational attainment and later-life outcomes are not just driven by economic factors such as credit constraints or parental resources. Individual beliefs about the benefits of education are a key driver in educational investment choices and can explain a substantial proportion in the socio-economic gap in educational decisions.
What drew you to Switzerland and the University of Zurich?
The fantastic Economics Department at the UZH.
What paper are you most proud of?
My work with Sule Alan and Seda Ertac titled “Ever Failed, Try Again, Succeed Better: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention on Grit”, investigates whether grit, a non-cognitive skill which has been shown to be highly predictive of achievement, is malleable in childhood and can be fostered in the classroom environment. For this purpose, we design an educational intervention, which presents students with animated videos and mini case studies that highlight i) the plasticity of the human brain against the notion of innately fixed ability, ii) the role of effort in enhancing skills and achieving goals, iii) the importance of a constructive interpretation of failures, and iv) the importance of goal setting. We randomize the intervention across primary schools (ages 8-10) in socio-economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods. We find that the intervention significantly increases students’ performance on standardized math tests by 0.2 standard deviations.
Who inspires you?
My work has been greatly inspired by the work of James J. Heckman and Orazio Attanasio.
Which paper changed your view on economics?
I don’t think there was one specific paper which substantially changed my view on economics. What did change my views substantially was participating in the HCEO Summer School on Socioeconomic Inequality at the University of Chicago, which I can highly recommend to any early-career researcher. I was particularly impressed by the lectures of James J. Heckman, which motivated me to also pursue research in the field of child development. In general, I would advise emerging scholars to seek out opportunities in which they can be exposed to different researchers and ideas.
Sandro Ambühl
UBS Foundation Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics of Financial Markets
His research interests include experimental economics, behavioral and experimental finance, as well as behavioral welfare economics.
What are you currently working on?
One of my current research projects is on how people form judgments about what are good decisions for others to make, and the mistakes people make and biases they have when forming such judgments. Such decisions matter in many contexts. In the policy domain, there are questions of paternalism (e.g. minimum retirement savings, seatbelt laws, etc.). They also play a big role for financial advisers or medical doctors, as well as for teachers and parents. We are designing an experiment to study these kind of decisions by real financial advisers. We are also working on an experiment about when and how people form such judgments about the unemployed and which conditions should be imposed on them. Here we are also looking at how people's judgments are affected by the race and gender of the unemployed individual.
What is the main insight from this work?
In a first paper on the topic, we consider two ways in which people can form judgments about what decisions are good for the other person: One can either (i) want others to avoid the mistakes one has made oneself, or (ii) try to impose one's own preferences on others. We find that the vast majority of subjects base their judgement on the latter. They try to get others to decide more as they would. It seems that they don’t fully recognize that others’ are different from themselves, or didn't think these differences should be there.
What paper are you most proud of?
Probably my paper "An Offer You Can't Refuse. Experimental Tests of ‘Undue Inducement’". Around the world, laws limit incentives for transactions such as clinical trial participation, human egg donation, or gestational surrogacy. A key reason is this notion of ‘undue inducement’ , a conceptually vague and empirically untested idea that incentives can lead to bad decision making by distorting individuals’ beliefs about the transaction. Three experiments show that participation incentives does induce selective information search and alter beliefs. However, these changes do not lower measured decision quality. They are consistent with Bayes-rational, costly information processing, which is shown to generate information acquisition that resembles motivated reasoning.
What are you looking forward to most in Zurich?
The UZH Department of Economics is clearly the best in continental Europe. It has an excellent reputation and is one of the birthplaces of my discipline, Behavioral and Experimental Economics. This is a very stimulating intellectual environment. It is a great privilege to work at this faculty, and even more so in a city with a quality of life like Zurich. I'm also looking forward to my children being close to their grandparents, and being able to ride a mountain bike again, unlike in flat Toronto.
Who inspires you?
I am lucky to have had many great mentors and collaborators, all of whom are extremely inspiring individuals. They all work towards a bigger goal, they do that with great integrity, they are incredibly tenacious, and are very happy about what they are doing. Amongst the better known names would be Doug Bernheim (chairman, department of economics, Stanford) and Al Roth (Nobel econ, 2012).
Jakub Steiner
Associate Professor
He is a microeconomic theorist who is especially interested in game theory, behavioural economics and information economics.
What is your area of expertise?
I am an economic theorist who enjoys building up models of human behavior.
What are you currently working on?
I'm finishing a paper on how marketing and advertising affects our choices. So far, economists didn't settle down on a theory of advertising. Some economists believe that ads change what we like and that this process of taste formation should be better left to psychologists. Other economists think that ads work because they provide useful information about products. Though, the latter approach doesn't square well with plethora of uninformative ads we've all seen.
What is the main insight from this work?
Our model suggests that ads may affect our choices even if they don't change our tastes, nor are they informative. Perhaps, ads are merely constraints -- obstructions -- to our natural learning about the products.
What drew you to Switzerland and the University of Zurich?
Great economic department and colleagues working on topics related to my research. I hope we'll end up writing papers together.
How do you like Zurich so far?
It has been a wonderful Autumn so far. My family is joining me soon, and then we'll explore Zurich and its surrounding quite a bit.
What paper are you most proud of?
I'm always most proud of the paper I'm currently working on. So right now, I'm most excited about the project on advertising. Let's wait to see whether referees will share the excitement.
Who inspires you? I don't get very attached to the authors of the ideas, it's their ideas that excite me.
Anne Ardila Brenøe
Assistant Professor of Child and Youth Development with a focus on breastfeeding, endowed by the Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation
Her research interests include labor economics, the economics of educations and child development.
What is your area of expertise?
I am an applied microeconomist working within the areas of child and youth development, economics of education, and labor economics. I am especially interested in how childhood conditions and experiences, such as child-parent interactions, affect the accumulation of human capital.
What are you currently working on?
My current research focuses on causes and consequences of gender differences in human capital formation, how breastfeeding causally affects child development, and how parenting style shapes child skills.
What is the main insight from this work?
The family and social environment affects particularly women’s gender conformity and has long-lasting consequences for their educational choice and labor market outcomes. An important, more general insight from my work on the impacts of breastfeeding is that we actually do not know much about the causal effects; it might be surprising for Economists to hear that people in medicine and science in fact still work on purely understanding the composition of human milk. I would be happy to share my own research insights on this topic in a future Newsletter when I get there…
What drew you to Switzerland and the University of Zurich?
Swiss chocolate, cheese, and wine. Just kidding.
Given my research interests, it was clear that the University of Zurich would be the ideal place for me to be. The empirical micro group at the department, the Jacobs Center, and then of course the unique opportunity to be part of the Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation Center of Economics of Child and Youth Development with a Focus on Breastfeeding made it a convincing case.
How do you like Zurich so far?
Zurich is a fantastic city to live in. I like the combination of living in a city offering everything I need for the everyday and being close to beautiful nature. We (my husband, my daughter, and I) feel at home in our new city.
What paper are you most proud of?
The paper I am most proud of is my job market paper. In that study, I examine how sibling gender composition affects women's gender identity, measured through their choice of occupation and partner. The results show that women with a brother acquire more traditional gender norms with negative consequences for labor earnings. I provide evidence of increased gender-specialized parenting in families with mixed sex children, suggesting a stronger transmission of traditional gender norms. Finally, I find indications of persistent effects to the next generation of girls.
Who inspires you?
That is a tough question to answer briefly. I am inspired by Sule Alan who has done some very interesting field experiments to foster grit, curiosity, and patience among economically disadvantaged schoolchildren in Turkey. Then, I am inspired by Douglas Almond and Janet Currie who have brought the economic research agenda on the importance of prenatal and early childhood conditions forward. Finally, I also need to mention James Heckman due to his major contributions to putting early childhood investment and skill formation on the research and political agenda.
Carlos Alós-Ferrer
NOMIS Professorship for Decision and Neuroeconomic Theory
His main research interest lies in the neuroeconomic foundations of decision making. Before joining our Department, he held a professorship in microeconomics at the University of Konstanz and, most recently, at the University of Cologne.
What projects are you currently working on?
Probably the most ambitious project on my desk is developing the neuroeconomic foundations of decision-making, for which I have just received an SNSF grant. The main idea is to use both stylized facts and detailed measurements from EEG measurement, response times, and eye tracking to develop better models of decision-making, ranging from preference revelation or the fact that decisions often arise from a conflict between different processes to the fundamental question of how and why preferences change. There are also many other things I am excited about, for instance my continued work on extensive form games, where we are currently looking at the interplay between formal-mathematical representations of games and the robustness of equilibria, or the selection and evolution of market platforms and institutions, where we have just collected a large amount of data in the lab.
What do you believe is your most important piece of research?
That is a difficult question for an interdisciplinary researcher, because research lines are very difficult to compare. Let me give you two answers. On my more empirically-motivated side, that would be the development of the Dual-Process Diffusion Model, which goes back to work with Anja Achtziger a few years ago. This is a very simple model, which combines ideas from dual-process theories and evidence-accumulation models and makes novel, testable predictions on response times in economic decisions. The predictions unveil why naive views of response times are often wrong and why the multiplicity of decision processes within an individual is important. Our model has also motivated several EEG studies which confirm our views. On my more mathematical side, it would be my research line on the foundations of extensive form games, which I have been developing for over 15 years together with Klaus Ritzberger. I believe our work has clarified how one should think about extensive form games and why many previous formulations rely on unnecessary and even counterproductive restrictions. We recently collected, reorganized, and expanded our research articles on the topic in a book that has appeared as a research monograph of the Game Theory Society.
Looking back at the highs and lows of your academic career so far, what advice would you give today's PhD students?
Last year I was invited to give the inaugural talk for the PhD program at my alma mater, the University of Alicante, and I was asked to also give a brief talk on precisely that. After getting over the shock of having become so senior as to be asked such a thing, I spent some time thinking whether I had any wisdom to impart. In the end, I boiled it down to a few points which, in hindsight, are absolutely obvious but I feel young econ PhD students often overlook. The first is to clarify your motivation. As a scientist, you are going into a profession where your life will be your work, so you need a really clear answer to the question of why you would embark in this, and if you cannot give one, maybe you should rethink it. The second is to be clear on the prerequisites, which are maths, statistics, maths, computing skills, maths, and constantly improving your English. Oh, and let us not forget the maths. The third is to remember that choosing a topic is far less important than finding a supervisor, because doing a PhD is a matching problem, and there have to be synergies. In addition, the final advice is simply to find time to read. A lot. Within and especially beyond economics.
Marek Pycia Professor of Organizational Economics
He is a microeconomic theorist who specializes in market design.
Associate Professor at UCLA Economics before coming to Zurich.
What projects are you currently working on?
In my current projects, my co-authors and I analyze auctions of treasury bills and electricity, externalities in labor markets, statistics used to describe assignments of school seats, the efficiency of trade, the simplicity of market mechanisms, and other questions. Of course, right now, I am also learning German.
What do you believe is your most important piece of research?
The answer depends on what we look for, on the measures we use to assess importance. If we look at the direct impact on markets and human lives, then my work on contracting for future kidney transplants is the most important. If we measure importance by the monetary value of questions studied, then my work on pay-as-bid auctions stands out. Should we use academic or other criteria, changing the ways economists think, my work on the equivalence of various school assignment procedures are top contenders.
If you think about the highs and lows of your academic career so far, what advice would you give?
Knowing what one likes to do and what one can do, finding ways to contribute, as well as integrity and focus are of course generally important. When it comes to PhD studies, in my experience the key challenge for most students is to grasp what makes a contribution to economic research. Ultimately, however, good advice is always very person-specific.
Nir Jaimovich Professor of Economics
He is a macroeconomist who specializes in studying business cycles and the dynamics of the labor market. Before coming to Zurich he held a professorship at the University of Southern California.
What projects are you currently working on?
One area of research is the connection between job polarization and jobless recoveries. Job polarization refers to disappearance of middle-skill occupations. Jobless recoveries refer to lack of employment recovery following a recession. My work shows that the root of such jobless recoveries can be traced to the disappearance of middle-skill jobs. In more recent work, I discuss how consumer behavior contributes to this. During downturns, consumers consume lower-quality goods. Since these require less labor to produce, the change in consumer behavior exacerbates the recession.
Finally, in more labor-oriented work, I show how in recent decades, the increase in the importance of social skills in the high-paying occupations has shaped the dynamics and evolution of this labor market.
What is your single most important piece of research?
Being an economist, I will let the market decide on this one.
What advice would you give to today’s bright young students?
Graduate school is really exhausting! But, what matters is whether you have the fire and desire to pursue the questions that bother you. If you wake up in the morning, and you feel obsessed about not understanding something, then academic life is exactly for you.
Florian Scheuer Professorship of Economics of Institutions, endowed by the UBS Center
His research interests include optimal income taxation of citizens, companies, and superstars in the presence of political and economic constraints. Joined us from
Stanford University.
What projects are you currently working on?
Many developed countries have seen a dramatic increase in inequality in the past decades. We’ve made great progress in empirically documenting these trends, but the open question is: Which policy responses does this necessitate? Ideally, such responses include tax policies, as well as institutional mechanisms, i.e. terms of regulations, education, insurance, industrial policies, etc.
One of your main research fields is income taxation. Give us an example of your work in this field.
My main motivation here is to incorporate more realistic accounts of labor markets into our design of tax systems. When some of the highest income earners are overpaid relative to their contributions to society, should we impose higher taxes on top salaries? This may seem obvious at first sight, but our work shows that the answer to this question crucially depends on whether the rent-seekers extract their slice of the existing economic pie at the expense of other rent-seekers or at the expense of workers who actually contribute to increasing the size of that pie.
Looking back at the highs and lows of your academic career so far, what advice would you give to today’s PhD students?
Collaboration! Your classmates are the most important resource during graduate school. This is a great time to start working together on research projects and start building coauthor relationships that might last well beyond graduation.
Ulf Zölitz Assistant Professor of Economics of Child and Youth Development, endowed by the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development
His primary research interest is the economics of education. Before joining he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the briq Institute on Behavior & Inequality in Bonn.
What projects are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a number of projects that try to shed light on how peers – people in our immediate environment - shape educational choices and performance. While we often have a strong intuition that “peers matter”, social scientists have not yet reached a consensus on how exactly peer effects can be empirically measured, which peer characteristics matter and how large peer effects are.
In one of my latest papers I am looking at how the personality of peers affects student performance. We find that peer personality is often a better predictor for how much I can learn from someone than just focusing on traditional measures such as students test scores, gender or race.
What do you believe is your most important piece of research?
I think my paper Gender Bias in Teaching Evaluations has important implications for how universities interpret students ‘evaluations of female faculty. Teaching evaluations are used by almost all universities around the world and are supposed to measure teacher quality. Our work shows that female university instructors receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues. However, we find no evidence that these gender differences are justified by objective measures of student learning. Students taught by female faculty had neither worse grades nor worked more hours. This bias against women in academia is driven by male students' evaluations, is larger for mathematical courses and particularly pronounced for junior women.
In the competitive world of academia, teaching evaluations are often part of hiring, tenure and promotion decisions and therefore can impact career progression. Therefore, our work has received a lot of public attention and it is exciting to see that many universities around the world are currently reconsidering what teaching evaluations measure and how the measurement of instructor quality can be improved.
Looking back at the highs and lows of your academic career so far, what advice would you give today's PhD students?
My academic career is not yet that long, but I think it is extremely important to frequently collect feedback from peers and more senior academics at all stages of the research process. I believe this is important to make a good assessment of whether a research idea is worthwhile pursuing before you invest a lot of time into it.
I also believe it makes a huge difference to work on topics that you like and that you are intrinsically interested in. In Economics it can take three or more years from the start to the publication of a paper and without an intrinsic interest in the topic it can be hard to find the motivation for going the extra mile.
