13.02.2023: Effectively combating climate change requires fundamental changes in economy and society. How can we achieve sustainable management of our resources while minimising the loss of prosperity? Which countries, industries and companies will be the winners and which the losers of climate change? How can we achieve international cooperation in environmental policy ? Researchers at the Department of Economics are investigating these and similar questions within the framework of the research focus "Achieving a Sustainable Economy".

The creation of a professorship for Sustainable Economics at the Department of Economics, endowed by the Vontobel Foundation, is a further milestone. Representatives of the Vontobel Foundation, the University of Zurich and the UZH Foundation and Excellence Foundation jointly celebrated this partnership on 6 February 2023. The process to fill the professorship will be initiated in the next few weeks.

The Department thanks the Vontobel Foundation for supporting its teaching and research activities.

_{Photo: back from left: Dominik Heitzmann (UZH Foundation), Annelise Alig Anderhalden (UZH Foundation), Katrin Polzer (Excellence Foundation), Christian Schwarzenegger (UZH), Marlies Heerdegen Lauterburg (Vontobel Foundation), Florian Scheuer (Department of Economics), Harald Gall (UZH), front from left: Maja Baumann-Brunner (Vontobel Foundation), Hans-Dieter Vontobel (Vontobel Foundation), Michael Schaepman (UZH), Peter Maurer (Vontobel Foundation)}

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2023-02-08: Congratulations to Dina Pomeranz and Florian Scheuer. Dina Pomeranz receives an SNSF Consolidator Grant of CHF 1.75 million for her research project "Raising Money for the State: Strengthening Tax Capacity in Lower-Income Countries while Minimizing the Burden on the Poor". Florian Scheuer receives an SNSF Consolidator Grant of CHF 1.22 million for his project "Taxing Capital Gains".

As Switzerland is only a non-associated third country in the Horizon Europe research programme of the European Research Council (ERC), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) launched the SNSF Consolidator Grants 2022 as a transitional measure on behalf of the Swiss Confederation. 182 applications were submitted for an SNSF Consolidator Grant 2022. After a two-stage evaluation, the SNSF decided to fund 30 applications.

 

2023-01-30: Congratulations to Silvia Maier and Marcus Grüschow on winning the UZH Postdoc Team Award! The new UZH Postdoc Team Award recognizes interdisciplinary postdoctoral teams for their outstanding and independent scientific achievements.

Silvia Maier and Marcus Grüschow met at the Department of Economics. “The department had a policy at the time that people who shared an office should be working on research questions in different fields,” says neuroeconomist Silvia Maier, who researches at the joint Translational Neuromodeling Unit at UZH and ETH Zurich. “The idea is that by talking to each other, people will come up with shared research ideas.” And this is precisely what happened with her and psychologist and neuroscientist Marcus Grüschow. Their research focuses on self-regulation and stress. It explores who is or isn’t good at handling stress, and how we can learn to control our response to stress.  

In a research project on dietary self-control, Silvia Maier was able to show how even moderate levels of stress negatively affected test subjects’ self-control – and not just acute stress, as was already known. For the project, she analyzed various regions of the brain using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to record the neural interactions between stress and self-control. Having established these data, she then teamed up with Marcus Grüschow, who specializes in pupillometry, the measurement of pupil size and reactivity.

“The size of pupils plays a key role when measuring the emotions of someone who is under stress,” says Marcus Grüschow. “Exposure to light isn’t the only factor that influences the size of our pupils. We can also observe changes when lighting stays the same.” A person’s eyes can reveal information about their emotional state, for example. When we’re happy or afraid, our pupils dilate. This is regulated by our autonomic nervous system and happens unconsciously.

Resilient to stress
The researchers observed test subjects using pupillometry and measured their response to unexpected strong stimuli. Scary images, for example, trigger a pupillary response that can be observed. This happens in mere milliseconds. Over the course of their project, the researchers were able to identify individuals who would respond to the stimuli but then also flexibly reappraise the situation. These individuals successfully used strategies to modulate emotional stress, and as a result of this their pupil constricted. “Some people even do this automatically. They use an emotional buffer or regulation strategy to mitigate the stress-inducing effects,” explains Grüschow. “People who can respond this flexibly are resilient to stress, while others experience stress for longer.” The latter may be at risk of diseases as a result of exposure to stressful situations.

Preventing stress overload
“It’s not trivial to measure whether individuals engage in regulating their emotions at any given moment, and most importantly, to predict how successful they will manage to do it.  These questions are paramount for both basic and applied research, because inflexibility or inability to adaptively regulate emotions through strategies that favor beneficial behavior in the long term is a hallmark of diseases such as depression, eating disorders, substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Silvia Maier.

Measuring the increase in pupil dilation could be used to help people who react strongly to stress, and emotional stimuli improve their resilience toward stress. This is one of the projects that Silvia Maier and Marcus Grüschow are currently pursuing

2023-01-26 We had the pleasure of welcoming Nobel Laureate Joshua Angrist (MIT) to our Department recently. After presenting some of his current research, mingling and discussions with students and researchers from the Department, he took the time to talk about his lifelong passion for econometric methods.
Read the Article on Linked-in

2023-01-25 Nick Netzer publishes a Op-Ed in the NZZ on the topic "Why economics?" He argues that the public perception of economics does not match reality.

A reprint of the article onLinked-in (in German)

15-01-2023: Financial incentives work in many areas, but they are controversial. Critics worry that incentives designed to encourage certain behaviors may also lead to undesirable side effects. A recent study refutes these concerns.

Florian Schneider, an economist at the University of Zurich, has used the pandemic to answer a question that has long plagued behavioral economics: Do financial incentives designed to encourage socially desirable behavior lead to more harm than good in the long run?

 

Possible long-term effects of financial incentives

Researchers and policymakers have been voicing their concerns for decades: financial incentives could crowd out intrinsic and prosocial motivations, undermine civic responsibility and foster the attitude that we should be financially compensated for every non-self-serving action. There are also moral considerations, explains Florian Schneider: "Do such incentives undermine self-determination by tempting people to act against their own values? And do they thereby reduce trust in the measure itself and in public institutions?"

To test these concerns, Florian Schneider, together with an international group of researchers, investigated a range of potentially negative consequences using a current and widely discussed measure: financial incentives for Covid-19 vaccination. He found the data for this in Sweden. In 2021, more than 5000 people took part in a study in which part of the group was offered the equivalent of about 20 Swiss francs for the first Covid vaccination. The researchers supplemented this data with records on demographics, income and attitudes. 

The financial incentive increased the vaccination rate from 72 to 76 percent. However, Florian Schneider and his co-authors Armando Meier (University of Lausanne) and Pol Compos-Mercade (Lund University) were more interested in the effect of the financial incentive on the following aspects:

• Willingness to receive second and third (booster) vaccinations - without financial incentive.
• Willingness to donate blood
• Assumptions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccination
• Trust in vaccination providers (pharmaceutical companies, health authorities, researchers)
• Sense of self-determination in decision to vaccinate
• Moral convictions and civic responsibility

No undesirable side effects

The results speak for themselves: "Our study gives the all-clear: We did not find any undesirable side effects in any of the above-mentioned areas due to a moderate financial incentive for the Covid-19 vaccination", Florian Schneider summarizes the findings. It is particularly noteworthy that the researchers found no impact on attitudes towards individual civic responsibility, moral convictions or sense of self-determination.

One caveat remains, however, as Florian Schneider notes: "Our data come from a wealthy, Western country and are based on a moderate financial incentive. We do not yet know whether the findings can be generalized to poorer countries or to very high financial incentives." 

Recognition for the young economist

That his research has been published in Nature, one of the leading scientific publications, is very rewarding for the economist, who obtained his PhD from the Department of Economics in 2020. "The question had been on my mind for a while. I was lucky that I found interested co-authors and that we had access to a current and comprehensive data-set with which we could answer one of the big questions of our subject, at least to some extent".

Schneider, F.H., Campos-Mercade, P., Meier, S. et al. Financial incentives for vaccination do not have negative unintended consequences. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05512-4

 

01-01-2023: Florian Scheuer, previously Vice Chairman, has taken on the role of new Chairman to the Department, and Björn Bartling has taken on the role of Vice Chairman.

Florian Scheuer joined the Department in 2016 and is the UBS Foundation Professor of Economics of Institutions. His research connects the fields of public finance, economic theory, macroeconomics and political economy. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economic Studies, among other journals.

Björn Bartling, Professor of Behavioral and Experimental Economics has been a Professor at the Department since 2011. In his research, he uses empirical methods to study the impact of social and moral motivations in economic contexts. Björn Bartling is also a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality (FAIR) - The Choice Lab, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of the European Economic Association and for Management Science.

Ralph Ossa has been appointed Chief Economist to the WTO as of January 2023. While he remains associated with our Department, he has stepped down as Chairman.

We wish all of them success in their new roles.

 

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05-12-2022: The perception that resources are unfairly distributed is at the root of many social conflicts. In a paper recently published in PNAS, Christian Ruff and Jie Hu investigate the motives influencing our perception of justice in resource distribution. They found that although people feel an aversion to inequality, they are also reluctant to harm others and to upend existing social hierarchies. 
Research shows that two conflicting motives play a particularly important role in the assessment of distributive justice: inequality aversion and the reluctance to harm others. To understand how these motives interact with each other, a team around Neuroeconomists Jie Hu and Christian Ruff used functional magnetic resonance tomography (fMRT) to study the brain activity of test participants during a redistribution task. 
The participants were generally more willing to make others financially worse off if this reduced inequality – in particular if the initial inequality was substantial. However, there seemed to be a limit: a redistribution that made the initially advantaged person worse off than the other was not chosen, even if this would lead to more equality overall. 

Press Release

Interview with Christian Ruff (German, starting min 35:53) 

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16-11-2022: Awards and Grants

Joachim Voth has been elected to the Fellowship of the Econometric Society. Fellows represent the highest authority in the field of economic theory; the Society is an international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation to statistics and mathematics.

Dina Pomeranz and her Team won the Innovation in Teaching Award from the European Economic Association (EEA) for their work with the Graduate Applications International Network (GAIN), which supports students from all African countries entering Economic studies. 

David Hémous receives the European Award for Researchers in Environmental Economics under the Age of Forty for his significant contributions to the analysis of the role of technological changes, the dynamics of the economy and of climate change.

Sandro Ambühl and co-authors win 2022 Exeter Prize for their paper “What motivates paternalism? An experimental study”.

Sandro Ambühl awarded an SNSF Starting Grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for his project “Positive Welfare Economics”.

David Dorn has been elected to the Council of the European Economic Association (EEA). He will sit for a term of five years, starting on January 1, 2023. David Dorn will join Dina Pomeranz and Florian Scheuer from our Department in this role. 

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11-11-2022: Sandro Ambühl has been awarded an SNSF Starting Grant of CHF 1.3 million by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for his project “Positive Welfare Economics”. Congratulations.

 

 

 

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13-10-2022: A study by the universities of Zurich and Mainz has shown that teaching children how to manage their attention and impulses in primary school has a positive long-term effect on their later educational success.

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26-09-2022: Joachim Voth has been elected to the Fellowship of the Econometric Society. Fellows represent the highest authority in the field of economic theory. The Econometric Society is an international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation to statistics and mathematics. Since its founding in 1930, the Society has elected only 700 fellows; 69 of them have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Joachim Voth is the second member from the Department of Economics, after Ernst Fehr, to receive the honor. The Society’s members nominate new Fellows each year in the fall. Prof. Voth’s area of specialization is economic and financial history. His research has been published in leading journals in economics, as well as in three books. His principal areas of research include long-run economic growth, the history of sovereign debt, causes and consequences of political extremism, and the economic history of the Industrial Revolution.

Fellows of the Econometric Society 2022

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2022.05.30: "How much did children really learn with remote classes during the pandemic?" And why this question matters.

By the end of March 2022, schools in 23 countries were still shut down, affecting 400 million children worldwide and leading to tremendous learning losses, especially in low and middle-income countries. This situation is still critical for those countries as vaccination rates are dragging and putting pressure towards school closures.

Guilherme Lichand, Professor of Economics at our Department and Chairman at the Center for Child Well-being and Development (CCWD) and Onicio Leal Neto, Post-Doc researcher, conducted a study in Brazil, in the Sao Paulo State, and found out some striking results:

Remote learning indeed caused worse learning outcomes during the pandemic, above and beyond other direct effects of COVID-19 and longer school closures causally magnified these effects.

The middle- and high-school students in São Paulo, learned only 40% in Portuguese and 20% in math classes relative to the in-person equivalent. Students reported they learned on average only 27,5% of what they would have learned in-person instruction and student dropouts might have increased from 10% to 35%.

Read the summary of the paper in the blog post in Nature Human Behavior

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2022.03.07: According to a recent study in "Nature Communications", even moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a smaller brain volume and a reduced mass of grey and white brain matter.

It is well known that chronic excessive alcohol abuse is detrimental to health. However, the evidence to date is contradictory as to whether light to moderate alcohol consumption could have similar negative consequences.

Gökhan Aydogan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics, was part of the international and interdisciplinary research team that studied a huge sample of 36,678 adults from the UK. "We already found negative associations between alcohol consumption and brain structure in people who consumed only one to two units of alcohol per day," he summarizes the findings. In the study, one pint of beer or a large glass of wine was considered to be two units of alcohol.

Effects are worse the more you drink

The study offers evidence that the effects of alcohol consumption on the brain are exponential. Gökhan Aydogan explains: "The last beer is not only responsible for the hangover, but also has a greater negative effect on brain ageing than all the previous ones consumed that day".

The researchers assume that brain of people consuming one unit of alcohol per day age around 1 year more than the brains of people who consume no alcohol at all. At four units per day, the difference in brain ageing is ten years.

The authors emphasize, however, that the study was not designed to establish a causal relationship between alcohol consumption and the change in brain structure, i.e. to prove a cause-effect relationship. Further studies on this would therefore be of great interest.

Article in Nature Communications

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2022.03.04: Mathias Hoffmann has recently given some interviews on Swiss Italian radio RSI in which he analyses the economic impacts of the SWIFT ban measures that were taken in the aftermath of the invasion of the Ukraine.

While the SWIFT sanctions do have a short-term effect on the Russian economy, Mathias Hoffmann explains that on the longer run, some adjustments will be inevitably made. In the current situation, China will probably become a larger gateway to channel Russian oils and gas to global markets, which might represent a unique opportunity for China to take a decisive step in establishing the renminbi as a serious rival to the dollar.

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Guilherme Lichand’s Social Entrepreneurship Seminar asks students to solve a social challenge by developing an idea and a viable business plan. Students acquire practical skills such as how to develop a business idea and create a business plan, measure social impact, pitching ideas to funding panels, mentoring, and handling setbacks.

To kick off this year’s seminar, the participants were invited to a private screening of two film: Machines, a portrait of workers in an Indian textile factory and Invisible Demons, an immersive documentary on the effects of climate change.

Introducing the following panel discussion Guilherme Lichand said how the poetic, yet disturbing documentaries left him hanging between hope and despair about the challenges the world is facing today. Rahul Jain, the director of both films, Simona Scarpaleggia, Cedric Mutz and Guilherme Lichand shared their perspectives and experiences in projects improving the working situation of individuals and environmental issues.

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2022.01.31: Why do some young men turn to crime, while others don’t? An international study shows that preferences such as risk tolerance, impatience and altruism as well as self-control can predict who will commit crime.

According to economic theory, risk-tolerant, impatient and selfish people with a low level of education are more likely to commit crime than people who are highly educated, risk averse, patient and selfless. However, confirming this hypothesis with scientific methods isn’t that easy. The education levels and socioeconomic factors of convicted criminals can be compared with those of the general population relatively easily. But assessing people’s risk tolerance, patience and altruism is much more difficult. Together with an international team of economists, Ernst Fehr has published a study that links data on risk, time and social preferences of young men to factors such as education, income, self-control and criminal records.  Risk-tolerant, impatient young men are more likely to commit property crime, while people with low self-control tend to commit violent, drug and sexual offenses.   

Press release

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