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Dear colleague,
join us for the upcoming MUES seminars. All seminars are conducted in English and are comprised of a 50-minute presentation followed by a 10-minute discussion session. These seminars are open to the public, and we warmly welcome spontaneous attendance. If you would like to have a bilateral conversation with any of our guests, join us for lunch, or attend the dinner with guests, please let us know in advance.
With best wishes,
MUES team
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Internal Research Seminar - Economics | 22 April - 12:00 PM | Academic Club | Michal Kvasnička | Department of Economics
Explorer’s Mindset: Why Being Optimistic Is Bad for You, But Good for Your Tribe
Optimism—the expectation that future events will be better than they actually are—is a widely spread cognitive bias. How can this bias survive? Previous studies have mostly claimed that it survives because it benefits the optimist. However, I show that optimism may have evolved not to benefit the optimist but her family or community, who share her genes. I present an agent-based simulation model in which optimism serves as a proactive/pro-exploratory bias, leading the optimist to explore more opportunities than an unbiased individual. This may harm the optimist herself, but it benefits her relatives who can learn from, imitate, or benefit from her explorations in other ways. In this way, kin selection can explain the origin and persistence of optimism.
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Research Seminar - Health Economics | 23 April - 2:00 PM | Hybrid meeting room | Simon Reif | Personal website | ZEW Mannheim
Market Entry of Digital Health Providers after the Introduction of a New Reimbursement Pathway
Germany was the first country worldwide to introduce a structured reimbursement pathway for digital therapeutics (DiGA), effectively allowing physicians to prescribe smartphone apps covered by statutory health insurance. In this seminar, Simon Reif presents recent research evaluating whether this pioneering regulation successfully incentivized innovation in the digital health market. Using high-frequency data from the Apple App Store and synthetic control methods, the study analyzes the market entry of health apps following the policy's introduction. The findings reveal a significant increase in the number of German-language digital therapeutics; however, this quantity did not translate into a broader diversity of medical conditions treated. Furthermore, the surge was largely driven by apps that monetize patient data for advertising rather than high-quality applications backed by scientific evidence. The presentation will discuss the implications of these results for designing policy that balances market incentives with patient privacy and care quality.
Teaser: Simon will be holding a separate, short workshop on the reproducible research tools used at his institute. Join us to learn how to implement these transparent workflows in your own analysis. This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting
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Internal Research Seminar - Economics | 29 April - 12:00 PM | Academic Club | Jonathan Stäbler | Department of Public Economics
Thinking before Acting
Do people think enough before acting? We study this in a first laboratory experiment where participants can either use a known but tedious method or search for a more efficient strategy whose existence they are made aware of, but whose nature is not disclosed. We exogenously induce early search through a "Freeze" intervention, where participants must spend 90 seconds studying solved example sequences from which the efficient strategy can be inferred. In the "No Freeze" condition, participants see the same examples but are free to move on to the task immediately. We find that Freeze significantly increases discovery rates, however not uniformly across specifications, and leads to more efficient task performance conditional on discovery. At the same time, given our calibration of time horizon and task difficulty, Freeze does not improve overall performance, as the gains from discovery are insufficient to offset the time spent searching. Conditional on discovery, outcomes are similar between the two conditions, while unsuccessful search reduces the overall output in "Freeze" due to lost time. These results highlight a trade-off between exploration and exploitation: forcing individuals to think before acting can backfire when the probability of discovering a better strategy is low or when too little time remains to exploit the discovery. The talk concludes with follow-up ideas on why individuals fail to search and how to better target efficient exploration.
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Research Seminar - Health Economics | 30 April - 2:00 PM | Hybrid meeting room | Laia Maynou | Personal website | Universitat de Barcelona
Paternity leave and maternal mental health
Motherhood is associated with persistent penalties in both labour market outcomes and health. However, the role of family policies in mitigating these effects, particularly with respect to maternal mental health, remains unclear. This paper examines the impact of extending paternity leave on maternal mental health. Using administrative health records covering all publicly funded births in Catalonia (Spain) between 2006 and 2024, we implement a local difference-in-differences design around the April 1st, 2019 reform, which introduced partially mandatory paternity leave for fathers. The analysis focuses on first time mothers giving birth within a three-month window around the reform cutoff and compares them to a control cohort from 2016. Maternal mental health is measured using diagnoses and prescription records for stress-related, mood-related, and broader mental health conditions drawn from primary care and pharmacy data. We find an increase in stress-related diagnoses and in the use of antidepressants and anxiolytics from the second year after childbirth among mothers exposed to the reform. These effects are concentrated among older mothers (above the median age of 31) and among those who do not have a second child within four years after birth. We find suggestive evidence that these patterns may be related to increased healthcare use and to stress-related mechanisms, including delayed fertility, changes in labour market attachment, and relationship instability. Ongoing work will extend the analysis to additional mental health outcomes and to subsequent paternity leave reforms This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting
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Internal Research Seminar - Economics | 06 May - 12:00 PM | Academic Club | Zdeněk Tomeš | Department of Economics
Why do we love our cars? Urban commuting choices
In 2025, a survey of 8,000 students and employees at ten Czech universities analysed commuting behaviour using a logit model of mode choice. Public transport dominated (47%), followed by car (32%) and walking or cycling (21%), with higher car use among employees and higher-income respondents. Distance, age (non-linear effect), and children significantly increased the likelihood of car use, particularly beyond 10 km. Differences across universities reflected urban size and topography, with higher public transport shares in large agglomerations. Key barriers to sustainable mobility were habits, distance, and public transport quality, while faster connections, lower costs, improved cycling infrastructure, and limited parking were identified as main drivers of modal shift.
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Research Seminar - Economics | 07 May - 2:00 PM | Hybrid meeting room | Nicolas Jacquemet | Personal website | Paris School of Economics
From Populist Narratives to Centrist Wins? The effect of Misinformation on Voting and Political Attitudes (with Laurence Vardaxoglou)
Despite widespread concern amongst both citizens and policymakers, the evidence as to the causal effect of far-right misinformation on voting is mixed. To explore the effect of misinformation on voting, we conducted an online experimental survey (N = 3,000) during the 2022 French presidential election. Participants were exposed to misinformation in a randomly assigned treatment. Importantly, we vary the time at which participants are exposed to misinformation: after the elicitation of their political attitude in the first experimental condition, before in the second one. In comparison to the baseline with no exposure to misinformation, this allows us to measure the effect of misinformation on both voting intentions and political attitudes. Our results are threefold. First, we show that the causal effect of exposure to misinformation is small in magnitude and, if anything, tends to move voters away from far left (and to a lesser extent, far right ones) candidates in favor of centrist candidates. Second, political attitudes of voters remain unchanged after exposure to fake news. And third, the perceived credibility of extreme candidates tends to decrease after exposure to fake news.
This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting
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Public Lecture - Economics | 11 May - 12:00 PM | Room P106 | Mai Nguyen | Personal website | Econic Partners
When Two Become One: What Economists Really Do in Merger Cases
What happens when firms merge, and how do economists determine whether competition is harmed? This lecture offers an accessible introduction to merger analysis, combining theory with a real-world case study. It explores how economists define markets, measure competitive pressure, and assess the likely impact of mergers on consumers. The session also highlights how data-driven tools and empirical methods are increasingly central to competition policy.
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Internal Research Seminar - Finance | 13 May - 12:00 PM | Academic Club | Matúš Horváth | Department of Finance
TBA
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Research Seminar - Economics | 14 May - 2:00 PM | Hybrid meeting room | Philippos Louis | Personal website | University of Cyprus
Dynamic (un)structured bargaining in the lab
We study how adding structure to bargaining changes both outcomes and behavior, bridging the experimental literatures on unstructured negotiation and tightly structured bargaining games. In an in-person lab experiment, pairs bargain dynamically under a deadline over a finite set of contracts with complete information. Holding this environment constant, we compare three processes: Unstructured Bargaining (UB), Alternating Offers (AO), and Voting with Alternating Offers and Vetoes (VAOV). We find that appropriately combining structural elements can mitigate disagreement—VAOV yields lower disagreement than AO, especially in later rounds—yet introduces a tradeoff: conditional on agreement, reaching “good” (efficient) agreements becomes harder, with VAOV exhibiting more inefficient outcomes. Behavior adjusts to the imposed rules in non-monotonic ways, with proposal activity and dynamics differing sharply across structures. The results highlight tensions between steering parties toward agreement and increasing cognitive and strategic demands, which are relevant from an economic design perspective. This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting
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Internal Research Seminar - Business & Management | 20 May - 12:00 PM | Academic Club | Eva Švandová | Department of Business Management
TBA
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