54,445 research outputs found
Why canât professional macroeconomic forecasters predict recessions?
The professional forecastersâ inability to anticipate macroeconomic recessions is well documented. The literature has found that aggregate or consensus forecasts are too optimistic before downturns and too pessimistic before recoveries. This paper explores whether this result also holds with individual data. Using a Spanish survey of professional forecasters conducted by Funcas, I find that forecasters are indeed too optimistic before recessions for two reasons. First, strong herding behaviour around the consensus forecast prevents those forecasters perceiving the early signs of a recession from adjusting their expectations as much as needed to predict it. And second, some forecasters put too much weight on the most recent developments when producing their forecasts and fail to fully account for the reversion to the mean embedded in the data-generating process. Both factors lead to negative forecast errors when a recession occurs. Consequently, professional forecasters could improve their forecasting performance by placing less weight on indicators from the recent past and by avoiding inefficient herding
Emotions Enforce Fairness Norms (a Simple Model of Strong Reciprocity)
In experimental games, many subjects cooperate contrary to their material interest and they do that in a reciprocal manner. In addition, many subjects punish those others who behave unkindly, and previous history usually influences subjectsâ choices. We propose a simple game-theoretical model to account for these and other experimental phenomena, and compare it with other models of social preferences and reciprocity.Emotions; Fairness; Path-Dependency; Strong Reciprocity; Social Norms
The Power of Words: Why Communication fosters Cooperation and Efficiency
We present a game-theoretical model that accounts for abundant experimental evidence from games with non-binding communication (âcheap talkâ). It is based on two key ideas: People are conditionally averse to break norms of honesty and fairness (i.e., the emotional cost of breaking a norm is low if few people comply), and heterogeneous with regard to their concern for norms. The model explains (a) why cooperation in social dilemmas rises if players can previously announce their intended play, (b) why details of the communication protocol like the number of message senders and the order in which players communicate affect cooperation, (c) why players in sender-receiver games tend to transmit more information than a standard analysis would predict, and (d) why senders of false messages are often sanctioned if punishment is available.Communication; Cooperation; Fairness; Heterogeneity; Honesty; Reciprocity; Social Norms
Do Economists Lie More?
Recent experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling
lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We use experiments as well to study the
socio-demographic covariates of such lie aversion, and find gender and religiosity
to be without predictive value. However, subjectsâ major is predictive: Business
and Economics (B&E) subjects lie significantly more frequently than other
majors. This is true even after controlling for subjectsâ beliefs about the overall
rate of deception, which predict behavior very well: Although B&E subjects
expect most others to lie in our decision problem, the effect of major remains. An
instrumental variables analysis suggests that the effect is not simply one of
selection: It seems that studying B&E has a causal impact on behavio
UPCâs institutional transformation towards sustainability
Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Do differences exist between how Engineering and non-Engineering lecturers perceive the importance of teaching competences?
A survey we conducted a few years ago concluded
that higher education teachers should have the following
competences: interpersonal, methodological, communicative, planning and management, teamwork and innovation. The authors of this work belong to the Institute in charge of the lecturer-training program at our university, which is basically a
technical one. In order to improve our training program, we pose the following research questions: What are the competences that lecturers perceive as less important. Do our university teachers (engineering teachers) have a different perception of the importance of the different lecturer competences compared to that of other teachers? The results we present in this paper come from a survey that was sent to a total of 15,209 teachers belonging to public universities in our community, and we received a total of 2,347 valid answers. As a result of this study,
we found which competences are those with a significantly bad rating by lecturers in general, and our lecturers in particular. We analyze what measures should be introduce into our teacher training program.Postprint (author's final draft
Individual Heterogeneity in Punishment and Reward
We design experiments to study the extent to which individuals differ in their motivations behind costly punishment and rewarding. Our findings qualify existing evidence and suggest that the largest fraction of players is motivated by a mixture of both inequity-aversion and reciprocity, while smaller fractions are primarily motivated by pure inequity-aversion and pure reciprocity. These findings provide new insights into the literature on other-regarding preferences and may help to reconcile important phenomena reported in the experimental literature on punishment and reward.Heterogeneity; inequity aversion; monetary punishment/reward; reciprocity; social norms.
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