Why can’t professional macroeconomic forecasters predict recessions?

The professional forecasters’ 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 subjects’ 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 (‘cheap talk’). 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, subjects’ major is predictive: Business and Economics (B&E) subjects lie significantly more frequently than other majors. This is true even after controlling for subjects’ 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

UPC’s 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

Semántica y discursividad de la legislación chilena sobre temas migratorios. Una aproximación crítica

this paper aims to analyze the semantic and discursive network betweenthe Western notion of State, Nation and Citizenship in the Chilean laws on immigration issues. this review is provided in the context of modernity and late capitalism, theoretical and conceptual references that are subsumed under this regulation. The absence of grand narratives and identities defined reread forces in the legal code, the migratory insertion of human capital in the country. From this point off the charges and cultural processes that entails.la presente investigación tiene por objeto analizar la red semántica y discursiva que existe entre la noción occidental de Estado, Nación y Ciudadanía en la legislación chilena sobre temas migratorios. Para ello se ha dispuesto revisar, en el contexto de la modernidad y capitalismo tardío, las referencias teóricas y conceptuales que se subsumen en esta normativa. La ausencia de grandes narrativas y de identidades denidas obliga a releer, en clave jurídica, la inserción del capital humano trashumante en el país. De este punto se desprenden las tipicaciones y los procesos culturales que esto conlleva