Working papers SES

Working papers SES
The Working Papers SES collection is a series of research papers authored by members of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). This series exists since 1980 and the themes investigated reflect the different scientific orientations of the Faculty: economics, business administration, computer management, quantitative methods, social sciences and media and communication sciences. The contents of the research papers are the sole responsibility of their authors.

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Université de Fribourg

Investors' perception of business group membership during an economic crisis : Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Ducret, Romain

(Working Papers SES ; 524)

This paper examines how investors perceive business group membership in Korea during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stock price performance analysis reveals evidence of a time-varying and heterogeneous value of affiliation: investors discount business group affiliation during a market collapse, but are willing to pay a premium for affiliation during market recovery. Overall, this pattern is more...

Université de Fribourg

Das House Kapital

Grossmann, Volker ; Larin, Benjamin ; Steger, Thomas

(Working Papers SES ; 523)

The housing wealth-to-income ratio has been increasing in most developed economies since the 1950s. We provide a novel theory to explain this long-term pattern. We show analytically that house prices grow in the steady state if i) the housing sector is more land-intensive than the non-housing sector, or ii) technological progress in the construction sector is weaker than in the non-housing...

Université de Fribourg

Adverse Effects of Monitoring: Evidence from a field experiment

Herz, Holger ; Zihlmann, Christian

(Working Papers SES ; 522)

We conduct a field experiment with remote workers to assess potential adverse effects of monitoring. We find that monitoring reduces the average performance of workers, in particular among the intrinsically motivated workforce. Moreover, monitoring cultivates the average worker: There are fewer high performers and the variance in performance is significantly reduced. Importantly, we show that...

Université de Fribourg

Assessing the effects of seasonal tariff-rate quotas on vegetable prices in Switzerland

Loginova, Daria ; Portmann, Marco ; Huber, Martin

(Working Papers SES ; 521)

Causal estimation of the short-term effects of tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) on vegetable producer prices is hampered by the large variety and different growing seasons of vegetables and is therefore rarely performed. We quantify the effects of Swiss seasonal TRQs on domestic producer prices of a variety of vegetables based on a difference-indifferences estimation using a novel dataset of weekly...

Université de Fribourg

Chasing dividends during the COVID-19 pandemic

Eugster, Nicolas ; Ducret, Romain ; Isakov, Dušan ; Weisskopf, Jean-Philippe

(Working Papers SES ; 520)

This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the trading behavior of investors around ex-dividend dates in Europe. The sudden decrease in the number of companies paying dividends reduced the opportunities to capture dividends. The firms that have maintained dividend payments during the pandemic thus attracted more interest than before. This led to a doubling in the magnitude...

Université de Fribourg

Transnational machine learning with screens for flagging bid-rigging cartels

Huber, Martin ; Imhof, David ; Ishii, Rieko

(Working Papers SES ; 519)

We investigate the transnational transferability of statistical screening methods originally developed using Swiss data for detecting bid-rigging cartels in Japan. We find that combining screens for the distribution of bids in tenders with machine learning to classify collusive vs. competitive tenders entails a correct classification rate of 88% to 93% when training and testing the method...

Université de Fribourg

Better roads, better off? : Evidence on improving roads in Tanzania

Dumas, Christelle ; Játiva, Ximena

(Working Papers SES ; 518)

Spatial isolation is considered as one of the main determinants of poverty. Therefore, many transport investments are undertaken with a stated objective of poverty reduction. In our paper, we evaluate a Tanzanian program that rehabilitated 2500km of major roads between 2008 and 2013. We deal with endogenous placement issues with a household fixed-effect strategy combined with a propensity score...

Université de Fribourg

Household resources and individual strategies

Deschênes, Sarah ; Dumas, Christelle ; Lambert, Sylvie

(Working Papers SES ; 517)

The question of diverging interests and preferences within couples over the use of household resources and the consequences of these conflictual views has been present for a long time in the development literature, albeit in a somewhat scattered way. This paper selectively reviews the abundant literature that offers insights into the intrahousehold decision-making process, the strategies put...

Université de Fribourg

Gender differences in wage expectations

Fernandes, Ana ; Huber, Martin ; Vaccaro, Giannina

(Working Papers SES ; 516)

Using a survey on wage expectations among students at two Swiss institutions of higher education, we examine the wage expectations of our respondents along two main lines. First, we investigate the rationality of wage expectations by comparing average expected wages from our sample with those of similar graduates; we further examine how our respondents revise their expectations when provided...

Université de Fribourg

Causal mediation analysis with double machine learning

Farbmacher, Helmut ; Huber, Martin ; Langen, Henrika ; Spindler, Martin

(Working Papers SES ; 515)

This paper combines causal mediation analysis with double machine learning to control for observed confounders in a data-driven way under a selection-on- observables assumption in a high-dimensional setting. We consider the average indirect effect of a binary treatment operating through an intermediate variable (or mediator) on the causal path between the treatment and the outcome, as well as...