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Item does not contain fulltext How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on social media, and gender–career and racial bias. After we provided them with historical trend data on the relevant domain, social scientists submitted pre-registered monthly forecasts for a year (Tournament 1; N = 86 teams and 359 forecasts), with an opportunity to update forecasts on the basis of new data six months later (Tournament 2; N = 120 teams and 546 forecasts). Benchmarking forecasting accuracy revealed that social scientists' forecasts were on average no more accurate than those of simple statistical models (historical means, random walks or linear regressions) or the aggregate forecasts of a sample from the general public (N = 802). However, scientists were more accurate if they had scientific expertise in a prediction domain, were interdisciplinary, used simpler models and based predictions on prior data. 18 p.

I present a framework to teach the macroeconomic effects of COVID-19 using the Keynesian Cross. I show that the rest of the economy suffers from a decline in demand once one sector of the economy is shut down and that the government spending and tax multipliers are smaller than usual. Fully insuring workers in the sector that is shut down cannot prevent a recession, but for the same aggregate transfers, such targeted income transfers do more to restore aggregate output than unconditional transfers. An extension to the (Formula presented.) curve shows that a lockdown results in deflation. These insights can be taught in an introductory or intermediate macroeconomics course.

We report data on the experimental articles published in the last two decades in seven prominent, general-interest economics journals, considering laboratory and other types of experiments separately. In addition, we also look at time trends in the characteristics of the published experimental articles. We find an overall increasing trend in the publication of experimental research. This is mainly driven by non-lab experiments, which have overtaken lab experiments in all considered outlets. The reversal of fortunes is most striking in the AER, where the share of lab experiments more than halved over the past twenty years and converged to the share of lab experiments in other Top 5 journals. We also observe some heterogeneities in publication, citations, rankings, and locations of authors’ affiliations across journals and types of experiments.

Employers are instrumental in the growth of non-standard employment, which exposes predominantly younger workers to higher levels of insecurity. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical lens, this article identifies which considerations, both positive and negative, underlie employers’ decision making with regard to the use of flexible contracts for younger workers and discusses how employers perceive future implications of an increasingly flexible labour market. Findings are based on interviews with 26 managers, HR professionals and directors working in different sectors of industry in the Netherlands: local government, education, health care, retail, corporate services and transport and logistics. While acknowledging benefits to the use of flexible contracts, interviewed employers also reported downsides to this practice. Using flexible contracts complicates retention of young talent, deters investment in training, negatively affects social morale on the work floor and puts pressure on younger workers. Interviewees did not deem employers primarily responsible for monitoring societal consequences of an increasingly flexible labour market and often did not see the bigger picture of how increased flexibility could have negative societal consequences. The findings suggest that corrective actions will not come from the side of employers.

Is the trust that participants have in their pension fund affected by its funding ratio (i.e., asset/liabilities ratio)? Based on survey, carried out in October 2021, among Dutch pension fund participants we link our survey data to the funding ratio of their pension fund as registered by the pension regulator. First, we show that the level of the funding ratio of their pension fund is positively associated with the trust level of participants. Pension funds with large buffers are associated with a high level of trust. Second, sub-group analyses show that the trust of younger participants is weakly related to the level of the funding ratio and this association is strong and positive for older (55+)/retired participants. It suggests that an interest in or awareness about the financial health of one's pension fund is associated with a higher responsiveness of participants in terms of trust. And third, firm-based pension funds enjoy a higher level of trust compared to sector-based pension funds.

Are individuals of higher socio-economic status less ethical than those of lower status? Highly popularised research findings claim that this is the case. This paper provides evidence against this claim, based on data from two large survey experiments with more than 11,000 participants. We prime social status in two heterogeneous samples of the German population and then elicit ethical behaviour in an incentivised experimental task. Thus, our data allows us to study both correlation (using demographic data) and causality (using the priming). Our study rejects the claim that higher social status individuals are less ethical on both accounts.

Several studies indicate that happiness follows a U-shape over the life cycle: Happiness decreases after the teenage years until reaching its nadir in middle age. A similar number of studies views the U-shape critically, stating that it is the result of the wrong controls or the wrong model. In this paper, we study the upward-pointing branch of the U-shape, tracing the happiness of European citizens 50 and older over multiple waves. Consistent with a U-shape around middle age, we find that happiness initially increases after the age of 50, but commonly stagnates afterwards and eventually reverts at high age. This pattern is generally observed irrespective of the utilized happiness measure, control variables, estimation methods, and the consideration of selection effects due to mortality. However, the strength of this pattern depends on the utilized happiness measure, control variables, and on mortality effects. The general pattern does not emerge for all countries, and is not always observed for women.

The paper considers a firm that has the option to invest in a project with an unknown profitability, which is affected by general market uncertainty. The project has the adverse effect that it can cause environmental damage. In case the firm has the option to undertake preventive investment at the time of market entry, we get that preventive investment is significant when (i) the project revenue is large, (ii) the environmental incidents potentially cause a huge reduction of firm value, and (iii) when preventive investment substantially decreases the probability of environmental damage occurrence. The optimality of such a preventive investment results in a significant delay of the project investment. When the firm has the possibility to invest in the project first and do the preventive investment later, this will accelerate the project investment and will result in a larger preventive investment when it indeed will decide to do that one later.

Recycling is emerging as both a viable alternative to extraction in many industries and a cornerstone of the circular economy. In this paper, we assess the role of paper and cardboard recycling on the forest sector, from both an economic and carbon perspective. For this purpose, we add the recycling industry to an existing forest-sector model in an attempt to capture its effects on other wood products and the overall forest resource. As the forest sector has an important potential for climate change mitigation, this model allows us to assess the effects of increased paper and cardboard recycling on the availability of the natural resource and the carbon balance of the forest sector. We show that these results are strongly linked to the hypotheses of substitutability and/or complementarity of recycled pulp and virgin pulpwood. Although we find increased emissions at the pulp sector level, the effects on emissions in other wood products are small. When pulp products are considered substitutes, we find the impact on total net sequestration to be positive. In the case where pulp products are considered complements, we find the impact on total net sequestration to be negative.

We review the literature that investigates the causal effect of ethnic diversity on support for redistribution. The results indicate that ethnic diversity or an increase in the salience of ethnic minorities tends to reduce support for redistribution. Evidence is presented that this finding can be interpreted as an outcome of ethnic discrimination. Nonetheless, there is substantial heterogeneity, such that the effect of ethnic diversity on support for redistribution depends on the specific context. An important moderator of the effect is whether ethnic diversity is accompanied by interethnic contact.

Purpose Flexible staffing arrangements have become a permanent feature of employment in many industrial societies. This article examines how employers perceive the consequences of using flexible staffing arrangements. It presents and assesses theoretically informed hypotheses on organisational situations in which negative consequences are more likely to be perceived. Design/methodology/approach This study uses data (n = 761) from a bespoke employers survey, fielded in the Netherlands in 2019. Structural equation modelling (SEM) is used to measure and explain employers' perception of downsides to flexible staffing arrangements. Findings Employers report distinct downsides to the use of flexible staffing arrangements in terms of performance, management and employee well-being. Model estimates show that employers using flexible staffing arrangements to acquire specific expertise or to follow other organisations in their sector perceive more downsides. Originality/value Empirical research on employers' perception of the disadvantageous consequences of using flexible staffing arrangements is scarce. This article highlights that this practice can discourage investments in human capital and lead to a sense of insecurity among young workers. It draws attention to the relevance of distinguishing between strategic motives when trying to understand organisational behaviour regarding non-standard forms of employment.

Projections of climate change damages based on climate-econometric estimates suggest that, without mitigation, global warming could reduce average global incomes by over 20% towards the end of the century (Burke et al., 2015). This figure significantly surpasses climate damages in Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). For example, global climate damages obtained with the seminal DICE model are just a 7% reduction in output (Nordhaus, 2018). Here, we show that the discrepancy between the projections can be resolved by accounting for growth convergence in a climate-econometric approach that is consistent with the macroeconomic models underlying most IAMs. By re-estimating the global non-linear relationship between temperature and country-level economic growth, our convergence-consistent projections reveal that under an unmitigated warming scenario, global climate damages amount to 6%.

We consider a model of influence over a network with finite-horizon opinion dynamics. The network consists of agents that update their opinions via a trust structure as in the DeGroot dynamics (De Groot (1974)). The model considers two potential external influencers that have fixed and opposite opinions. They aim to maximally impact the aggregate state of opinions at the end of the finite horizon by targeting one agent in one specific time period. In the case of only one influencer, we characterize optimal targets on the basis of two features: shift and amplification. Also, conditions are provided under which a specific target is optimal: the maximum-amplification target. In the case of two influencers, we focus on the existence and characterization of pure strategy equilibria in the corresponding two-person strategic zero-sum game. Roughly speaking, if the initial opinions are not too much in favour of either influencer, the influencers’ equilibrium behaviour is also driven by the amplification of targets.

This paper studies a new type of interactive Operations Research problem, called a graph machine scheduling problem (GMS-problem). A GMS-problem combines aspects from minimum cost spanning tree problems and sequencing problems. Given a graph, we aim to first establish a connection order on the players such that the total cost of connecting them to a source is minimal and second to find a cost allocation of such an optimal order among the players involved. We restrict attention to GMS-problems on trees and propose a recursive method to solve these tree GMS-problems integrated with an allocation approach. This latter mechanism consistently and recursively uses myopic reference orders to determine potential cost savings, which will then be appropriately allocated. Interestingly, the transition process from a myopic reference order to an optimal one will be smooth using the switching of blocks of agents based on the basic notion of merge segments.

We study redistribution in a setting where individual responsibility and circumstance characteristics determine pre-tax income. We distinguish between ex ante and ex post versions of the key principles of compensation and reward. Furthermore, we distinguish between absolute and relative versions of reward. On the basis of these axioms, we provide characterizations of five familiar and two new redistribution mechanisms.

Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular means to fund the provision of public goods and especially of nature conservation projects. We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment by setting up a web-based user interface, very similar to actual crowdfunding platforms, to test whether coordination mechanisms, like seed money and decoy projects, can increase the effectiveness of crowdfunding campaigns if multiple public goods projects are eligible for funding. We find some of our treatments to affect coordination especially via early contributions, but not always in an intuitive way. Our results are confirmed in a follow-up experiment with actual nature conservation projects.

Intertemporal choices are affected by both discount rate and utility curvature. We investigate how the two aspects of time preference are affected by the size of the total budget using an intertemporal allocation task. At the aggregate level as well as at the individual level, we find magnitude effects both on the discount rate and on intertemporal substitutability (i.e., utility curvature). Individuals are more patient when dealing with larger budgets and also regard larger budgets to be more fungible. The latter effect suggests that the degree of asset integration is increasing in the stake. Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100003246 Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (1034)

This paper measures intergenerational transfers through the solidarity reserve of the newly proposed Dutch occupational pension contract. Our first conclusion is that the role of the solidarity reserve is higher than it may appear at a first glance. The fraction of pension savings that can go directly into the solidarity reserve is limited to 10%. However, we find that, in addition, around 30% of the pension savings of a young worker can subsequently be transferred to the solidarity reserve via a levy on future positive excess returns. Our second finding is that the solidarity reserve can introduce a substantial pay-as-you-go element within a funded pension scheme. This feature of the solidarity reserve can be overlooked easily and is not mentioned in the pension bill. Our policy recommendation to pension funds is to make explicit whether or not there is a pay-as-you-go element via the solidarity reserve, and if so to assess whether this is desirable.

We consider a funded pension system where collective risks, in a simple Black-Scholes financial market, are allocated to the retirement savings of individual participants. In particular, we consider an allocation in such a way that the relative effect on total retirement wealth, that is, the sum of financial wealth and human capital, is the same for each participant. We show that this allocation is Pareto efficient. This stylized life-cycle fact inspired the new Dutch retirement system. Subsequently, we extend the allocation rule to a setting that includes annuity risk. This risk can be a traded risk (e.g., interest rate risk) as well as a non-traded risk (e.g., longevity risk). From our closed-form solutions, we identify the similarities between our optimal allocation rule and the allocation rule in the new Dutch retirement system. A numerical example illustrates our findings.

One of the key elements in the planned pension reform in the Netherlands is to abolish the implicit subsidy from younger to older workers inherent in pension schemes with age independent contribution and accrual rates. This paper investigates the impact of changes in contribution rates on wages, labor costs and labor supply using a rich administrative data set covering individual employees in the Netherlands for the period 2006–2012. With a panel-based approach and data on both marginal and average contribution rates we aim to provide insight into the mechanisms underlying the incidence and labor supply (in hours) effects of pension contributions. For a two-year change in pension contributions we find that 70% of this change is passed on to the labor costs of employers, while 30% is passed on to the net wage of the employee. No significant effects are found for labor supply. At least in the short and medium run, our results seem at variance with the standard demand-and-supply model for the labor market, but are consistent with a bargaining model.

In this paper, I study the macroeconomic effects of labor markets that feature both flexible and permanent contracts. I argue that the countercyclical nature of flexible contracts reduces the risk of unemployment fluctuations for permanent workers, resulting in a more stable aggregate demand and a more stable business cycle. Using a New Keynesian model with imperfect unemployment insurance and a two-sector search model that incorporates both permanent and flexible contracts, I quantify the role of flexible contracts in stabilizing the economy. I find that an economy with 15% flexible employment experiences lower volatility in output, inflation, and employment compared to one without flexible employment. However, this comes at a cost to flexible workers in terms of employment fluctuations, resulting in a decrease in aggregate welfare. These results underscore the importance of flexible contracts in stabilizing the business cycle, while also highlighting the need for policymakers to ensure that all workers benefit from them.

This paper provides a multi-actor perspective on the realization of new infrastructures, motivated by the necessity for infrastructures to support the ongoing climate and energy transition in general, and CO2 transport infrastructures for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) in particular. We develop a general model to represent infrastructures that allows for a unique decomposition into `elementary infrastructure components' based on heterogeneous user requirements. Notably, it incorporates a cost function with a very generic and adaptable structure, for which we can still explicitly determine the costs of each individual component. As a direct consequence an intuitive cost allocation rule is obtained: equal component cost sharing. This allocation rule is in line with existing game-theoretic concepts and satisfies the desirable properties of advantageous scaling and coalitional rationality. Advantageous scaling guarantees that the costs allocated to each existing user do not increase if the number of users grows larger and coalitional rationality ensures that there is no subgroup of infrastructure users that would have a financial reason to object to the cost allocation. Additionally, we examine the application of our model to a prospective CO2 transport infrastructure for CCUS in the port of Rotterdam and the adjoining industry area.

This paper studies a firm’s investment decision in production capacity where product demand follows a product life cycle (PLC), implying that demand first grows and then declines. The starting point of the decline phase is uncertain. The investment decision involves deciding about the timing and the size of the investment. We make a distinction between the firm being a product life cycle leader and a product life cycle follower. A PLC-leader will always first experience demand growth before the decline kicks in. In case of a PLC-follower, the firm enters an existing product life cycle, implying that the decline can already start before this firm even has invested. It turns out that it makes a major difference whether the firm is a PLC-leader or PLC-follower. To benefit from a period of demand growth, the PLC-follower has an incentive to invest early, thus when the current demand level is still low. This forces the firm to limit the investment size. The PLC-leader, on the contrary, always chooses the investment size corresponding to demand growth throughout, where the probability of demand decline simply delays the moment of investment.

Public interest theory has argued that lack of trust in companies may reduce support for free markets. The literature did not address, however, the underlying causes of lack of trust and support of free markets in customer’s perceptions of virtuousness in economic actors. Combining public interest theory with virtue theory and stakeholder trust theory of organizations, we surmise that if customers perceive that employees of companies have insufficient due care for customers’ interests, the perceived trustworthiness of those companies will be low. Customers will then be more inclined to support government regulation in that particular sector or industry. In this paper, we test the relevance of these relationships for the banking sector using a representative sample of 5844 respondents in the Netherlands. We find that if bankers are perceived as persistent in their due care for customers, this encourages a perception that banks are trustworthy, which in turn induces support for free markets in banking and reduces the call for government regulation. An important management implication of our research is that banks should foster due care by means of employee-virtue training programs to enhance trust, thus generating more support for free market operations in the banking sector.

An important societal problem is that people underinsure against risks that are unlikely or occur in the far future, such as natural disasters and long-term care needs. One explanation is that uncertainty about the risk of non-reimbursement induces ambiguity averse and risk prudent decision makers to take out less insurance. We set up an insurance experiment to test this explanation. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, we find that the demand for insurance is lower when the nonperformance risk is ambiguous than when it is known and when decision makers are risk prudent. We cannot attribute the lower take-up of insurance to our measure of ambiguity aversion, probably because ambiguity attitudes are richer than aversion alone.Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11166-021-09364-7.

Recent progress in information technologies provides sellers with detailed knowledge about consumers' preferences, approaching perfect price discrimination in the limit. We construct a model where consumers with less strategic sophistication than the seller's pricing algorithm face a trade-off when buying. They choose between a direct, transaction cost-free sales channel and a privacy-protecting, but costly, anonymous channel. We show that the anonymous channel is used even in the absence of an explicit taste for privacy if consumers are not too strategically sophisticated. This provides a micro-foundation for consumers' privacy choices. Some consumers benefit but others suffer from their anonymization.

Business practices and performance vary widely across businesses within the same sector. A key outstanding question is why profitable practices do not readily diffuse. We conduct a field experiment among urban retailers in Indonesia to study whether alleviating informational and behavioral frictions can facilitate such diffusion in a cost-effective manner. Through quantitative and qualitative fieldwork, we curate a handbook that associates locally relevant practices with performance, and provides idiosyncratic implementation guidance informed by exemplary local retailers. We complement this handbook with two light-touch interventions to facilitate behavior change. A subset of retailers is invited to a documentary movie screening featuring the paths to success of exemplary peers. Another subset is offered two 30-minute personal visits by a local facilitator. A third group is offered both. Eighteen months later, we find significant impacts on practice adoption when the handbook is coupled with the two behavioral nudges, and up to a 35% increase in profits and 16.7% increase in sales. These findings suggest both informational and behavioral constraints are at play. The types of practices adopted map the performance improvements to efficiency gains rather than other channels. A simple cost–benefit analysis shows such locally relevant knowledge can be codified and scaled successfully at relatively low cost.

Combining click data from a swedish newspaper and administrative data on asylum seekers in sweden, i examine whether a larger presence of refugees in a municipality induces people to avoid news that may encourage welcoming the newcomers. Exploiting the unexpected inflow of refugees to Sweden during 2015 and their exogenous allocation across Swedish municipalities, I find that people living in municipalities where the relative number of refugees is larger read fewer articles about asylum seekers. The decrease in clicks is 36% larger for more empathic articles and is correlated with less engagement in activities aimed at welcoming refugees.

International audience; Motivation crowding theory examines how external intervention may undermine intrinsic motivation. Earlier research has shown that intrinsic motivation plays a decisive role in fostering environmental performance of households and consumers, but that external pressures may “crowd out” the intrinsic motivations. Similar patterns could be expected in business organizations. However, only a few studies consider crowding effects of financial incentives on businesses’ intrinsic motivation to environmental responsibility, whereas none addresses the impact of external pressures from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and media, despite their prominent role. This study aims to address this gap by offering a mediation framework explaining how pressures from NGOs and media affect intrinsic motivation. Empirically, the paper adds to the scant empirical research by estimating a model on a sample of 4,364 enterprises from twelve European countries. We find that NGOs and media pressures increase financial benefits from environmental responsibility, which in turn crowd in intrinsic motivation in enterprises.

We conducted a randomized controlled trial with small and medium-sized enterprises in Kenya to estimate the causal impact of an e-payment technology on business finance. Using an encouragement design, we exogenously increased e-payment usage among a random subset of firms by relaxing adoption transaction costs and information barriers. Sixteen months after the intervention, we find that the e-payment technology increased access to mobile loans (in number of loans, as well as in the amount borrowed) by at least 50% (0.17 sd), likely due to the reduction of information asymmetries brought by an increase in digital transactions. We find no effect of the e-payment technology on sales and profits, but we do find a reduction of sales volatility and precautionary investment, especially for smaller firms. This suggests that mobile loans help smaller firms cope with short-term negative shocks. We provide a stylized model of business finance that rationalizes these findings.

This paper provides evidence on how bank performance and strategies vary with the degree of bank internationalization using data for 113 countries during 2000–15. Bank internationalization is associated with lower valuations and lower returns on equity. After the global financial crisis, international banks were revalued particularly if they had stable funding in the form of deposits and if they had more generous deposit insurance coverage. For international banks headquartered in developing countries, bank internationalization is related negatively with the cyclicality of their domestic credit growth with respect to home country GDP growth, smoothing local downturns. In contrast, if the international bank is from a high-income country investing in a developing country, its subsidiary bank lending is relatively procyclical, which can be destabilizing.

Trust in pension providers by participants is essential because pension providers try to fulfill their pension promises in a fundamentally uncertain world. Reforms and crises are therefore the ultimate testing ground for pension trust. In this paper we estimate with repeated cross-sectional survey data how trust and distrust in Dutch pension funds and the government have evolved over the period 2004–2021 and what the impact of financial stability on trust in these two institutions has been. Financial stability of pension funds, measured by their funding ratio, is shown to affect trust positively, but it does not decrease distrust significantly. Based on the estimation results, achieving a situation where the majority of the adult population trusts pension funds is likely to be attained at funding ratios of 115 or higher. Financial stability of government (measured by government debt/GDP ratio) does not affect either trust or distrust levels. Underlying drivers of distrust and trust such as personal characteristics are also notable: self-employed are more prone to distrust pension funds than employees. Women are more than men likely to take a neutral position.

In this article, we discuss concepts of procedural fairness and equality of opportunity, and review the descriptive evidence regarding such procedural fairness preferences and their dynamic consistency. We then review the empirical relationship between equality of opportunity and preferences for redistribution. We discuss evidence derived from both survey and experimental studies.

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.

Behavioral constraints like workers’ motivation and self-control problems can be a barrier to growth of small firms in LICs. In a field experiment, we test whether setting non-binding production goals improves workers’ performance in small cassava processing firms in Ghana. We first train workers to measure their daily production and then randomly assign a sub-sample to set daily production goals. Workers who set goals increase output by 16%, work 40 minutes longer per day and are 9% more productive per hour, increasing the average product of labor by 14%. The data suggests that goals act as a commitment device and ignite workers’ competitive spirit.

Participants’ trust in pension intstitutions (pension funds and government) is crucial because pension providers try to fulfil their pension promises in a fundamentally uncertain world. Therefore, buffers are necessary to cover shocks, like the Great Recession, in order to make good on those promises. But, do shocks to financial buffers, like the funding ratio and the public debt ratio, really affect the trust of citizens in pension funds and the government?

The literature on social protection does not sufficiently address the impact of traumatic experiences on vulnerability and resilience. Failure to address trauma in highly traumatized and vulnerable populations could negate the effects of social protection programs. This study used a natural experiment (n = 465) to explore the effectiveness of trauma counseling and cash/in-kind transfers on enhancing social economic resilience among members of vulnerable communities in Northern Uganda. The results suggest that trauma counseling is more relevant than cash/in-kind transfers in enhancing social economic resilience; however, no synergetic effect on social economic resilience was found in relation to receiving trauma counseling in conjunction with social protection cash/in-kind assistance. This research adds to the existing literature by providing insights into the underlying factors contributing to vulnerability, such as trauma, as essential elements to be considered in designing and implementing social protection programs in vulnerable communities.

Do firearm purchase delay laws reduce aggregate homicide levels? Using variation from a 6-month countrywide gun demand shock in 2012/2013, we show that U.S. states with legislation preventing immediate handgun purchases experienced smaller increases in handgun sales. Our findings indicate that this is likely driven by comparatively lower purchases among impulsive consumers. We then demonstrate that states with purchase delays also witnessed comparatively 2% lower homicide rates during the same period. Further evidence shows that lower handgun sales coincided primarily with fewer impulsive assaults and points towards reduced acts of domestic violence.

A Generalized Additive Game (GAG) (Cesari et al. in Int J Game Theory 46(4):919–939, 2017) is a Transferable Utility (TU) game (N, v), where each player in N is provided with an individual value, and the worth v(S) of a coalition $$S \subseteq N$$ is obtained as the sum of the individual values of players in another subset $$\mathcal {M}(S)\subseteq N$$ . Based on conditions on the map $$\mathcal {M}$$ (which associates to each coalition S a set of beneficial players $$\mathcal {M}(S)$$ not necessarily included in S), in this paper we characterize classes of GAGs that satisfy properties like monotonicity, superadditivity, (total) balancedness, PMAS-admissibility and supermodularity, for all nonnegative vectors of individual values. We also illustrate the application of such conditions on $$\mathcal {M}$$ over particular GAGs studied in the literature (e.g., glove games (Shapley and Shubik in Int Econ Rev 10:337–362, 1969), generalized airport games (Norde et al. in Eur J Oper Res 136(3):635–654, 2002), fixed tree games (Bjorndal et al. in Math Methods Oper Res 59(2):249–270, 2004), link-connection games (Moretti in Multi-agent systems and agreement technologies, vol 10767. Springer, Cham, 2008; Nagamochi et al. in Math Oper Res 22(1):146–164, 1997), simple minimum cost spanning tree games (Norde et al. in Eur J Oper Res 154(1):84–97, 2004; Tijs et al. in Eur J Oper Res 175(1):121–134, 2006) and graph coloring games (Deng et al. in Math Program 87(3):441–452, 2000; Hamers et al. in Math Program 145(1–2):509–529, 2014)).

Phased retirement can be an important arrangement for societies making the transition to an older work force. However, the uptake of these type of programs is quite low. In this paper we compare the older worker and employer perspective on using these programs. While older workers point the importance of organizational barriers for refraining from use of phased retirement arrangements, employers hardly seem to see a role for themselves even though they acknowledge the potential positive impact of phased retirement in extending working careers. Phased retirement is seen as a private affaire by employers. The large gap between the potential and actual use of these programs remains worrisome and may be exemplary for similar well-intended programs at extending the working life.

We report the results of an experiment conducted to study the effect of strategic substitutability and strategic complementarity on cooperation in infinitely repeated two-player games. We find that choices in the first rounds of the repeated games are significantly more cooperative under strategic substitutes than under strategic complements and that players are more likely to choose joint-payoff maximizing choices in the former than in the latter case. We argue that this effect is driven by the fact that it is less risky to cooperate under substitutes than under complements. We also find that choices do not remain more cooperative under strategic substitutes than under complements over the course of the rounds within the repeated games. We show that this is because best-reply dynamics come into the picture: players are more inclined to follow cooperative moves of the partner under complements, offsetting the treatment effect observed in the first rounds.

Among business ethicists, Adam Smith is widely viewed as the defender of an amoral if not anti-moral economics in which individuals’ pursuit of their private self-interest is converted by an ‘invisible hand’ into shared economic prosperity. This is often justified by reference to a select few quotations from The Wealth of Nations. We use new empirical methods to investigate what Smith actually had to say, firstly about the relationship between free market institutions and individuals’ moral virtues, and secondly about the further relationship between virtues and societal flourishing. We show with more quantitative precision than traditional scholarship that the invisible hand reading dramatically misrepresents both the nuance and the sum of Smith’s analysis. Smith paid a great deal of attention to a flourishing society’s dependence on virtues, including the non-self-regarding virtues of justice and benevolence, and he worried also about their fragility in the face of the changed incentives and social conditions of commercial society.

Pension funds face macro-longevity risk or uncertainty about future mortality rates. We analyze macro-longevity risk sharing between cohorts in a pension scheme as a risk management tool. We show that the optimal risk-sharing rule and the welfare gains from risk sharing largely depend on the retirement age policy. In case of a fixed retirement age welfare gains from sharing macro-longevity risk measured on a 10-year horizon are between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of certainty equivalent consumption after retirement for each cohort. By contrast, if the retirement age is fully linked to changes in life expectancy, welfare gains are substantially higher. In this case the risk bearing capacity of workers is particularly large because their labor supply acts as a hedge against macro-longevity risk. As a result, workers absorb risk from retirees in the optimal risk-sharing rule, thereby increasing the welfare gain for each cohort up to 1.8 percent in the Lee-Carter mortality model and up to 2.9 percent inthe Cairns-Blake-Dowd model.

What role does population play in thinking about the problem of climate change and some of its solutions? In a survey conducted between February and April 2020, we asked European demographers to state their views on the relationship between climate change and population developments, and asked them to rate their concern about climate change and other socio-demographic issues. We found that climate change is at the top of the list of demographers’ concerns, but that their sense of urgency with respect to taking action to redress global warming is not matched by their belief that population policy can make a crucial difference in reducing CO2emissions: demographers are highly divided on the question whether the global population size should be reduced to lower CO2emissions, as well as on the question whether family planning is an effective policy instrument.

Climate change policies are often met with resistance due to fears over the loss of competitiveness and employment. This paper studies the effect of energy prices, which are a proxy for a carbon tax, on the labor share of income and industry concentration. Using aggregated administrative data from 15 European countries and 56 sectors for the years 2000-2016, and applying a shift-share instrumental variable approach, we find that the energy price has a negative and quantitatively significant effect on the labor share. Exploring the potential mechanisms, we document strong evidence that the degree of substitution between energy and labor is lower than the substitution between energy and capital. Reallocation among firms, changes in aggregate markups or the value-added to output ratio induced by energy price shocks do not lead to sizable changes in the labor share. We find no robust evidence that energy prices affect industry concentration and markups. These results indicate sizable potential redistributional impacts of climate change policies, at least in the short-run, as the transitional costs differ across the primary factors.

I study the diffusion of technology when the decision to search for productivity-enhancing technologies depends on the network of interactions between agents. Agents have the option to engage in costly learning from their first-degree connections. The more productive an agent's connections, the higher the gains from learning. Hence, the network affects the reservation productivity at which agents choose to learn and, therefore, affects aggregate productivity. I find that the denser the network, the higher total factor productivity and the lower inequality on average. This effect is due to less dispersed gains from learning across nodes when network density increases. Despite the increase in productivity, the share of agents that learn in equilibrium is not affected by network density.

In the past 50 years, almost one million U.S. students have been present on school grounds during a shooting. This paper examines the long-term and intergenerational effects of school shootings on earnings, educational attainment, and mobility. I find that exposure to a school shooting decreases survivors’ hourly wage by 20:8% and these effects persist over their lifetime. Furthermore, I show that the effect of school shootings lasts even beyond the initially treated and has detrimental effects on their children. I find that having shooting-exposed parents decreases children’s hourly wage by 18:8%.