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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 | 18 March - 12:00 PM | Academic Club | Miloš Fišar | Department of Public Economics
Rewarding Investments in Innovation Through Auctions
This study examines whether bid advantages can stimulate innovation by comparing bonus-based incentives with prize-and-penalty schemes. We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment with two sequential stages. In the innovation stage, participants choose an R&D investment level; in the auction stage, they compete for a procurement contract in a second-price auction. We implement three treatments: a benchmark with no incentive, bonus scheme, and prize-and-penalty scheme designed to be payoff-equivalent to the bonuses. While bonuses operate within the auction stage by rewarding the innovator and disadvantaging the non-innovator, prize-and-penalty schemes shift these incentives to the innovation stage, thereby removing auction distortion and reducing uncertainty. We test whether these mechanisms generate different levels of innovation and whether the timing and framing of incentives affect behavior, particularly through sunk-cost bias.
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Research Seminar - Economics | 19 March - 2:00 PM | Hybrid meeting room | Pablo Brañas Garza | Personal website | Loyola Andalucia University
Seeing less than there is: (Mis)-perceptions of social relationships
Accurate perception of social relationships is central to human social cognition, yet little is known about how well individuals perceive incoming social ties within their natural social environments. We collected data from 3,077 adolescents across 117 classrooms and analyzed complete social networks comprising four directed relational layers—friends, best friends, enemies, and worst enemies—alongside adolescents’ predictions of who would nominate them in each layer. Across all layers, perceptual accuracy was strikingly low. Only 0.29% of students assessed all of their relationships correctly. Errors were overwhelmingly driven by underestimation: adolescents systematically failed to recognize how many peers named them, both positively and negatively. Misperception was structured rather than random. Popularity (in-degree) was strongly associated with underestimation, whereas sociability (out-degree) was associated with overestimation. These structural patterns were consistent across relational layers and error types and showed no systematic improvement with age. Together, these findings reveal robust structural asymmetries in social cognition, suggesting that young people perceive far less of their social worlds than there is. This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting
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Internal Research Seminar - Economics | 25 March - 12:00 PM | Academic Club | Petr Koráb | SAV and Masaryk University
Economic Policy Uncertainty Inference with Emotion Recognition Models: Towards a New EPU Index
Inaccurate inference about economic policy uncertainty affects international investment returns, and investment decisions made with imperfect information result in financial losses for all market participants. The classic widely used Baker et al. (2016) index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) suffers from methodological imperfections in construction due to (1) neglecting semantics, (2) data quality fluctuations, and (3) ignoring tonality/emotion in the data. In this paper, we introduce a novel emotion-based economic policy uncertainty index that (i) improves the semantic identification of economic policy by extracting a large set of tokens from RoBERTa, (ii) uses a vast CC-News media dataset, and (iii) identifies uncertainty by a finetuned emotion recognition model.
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Research Seminar - Economics | 26 March - 2:00 PM | Hybrid meeting room | Kamila Cygan-Rehm | Personal website | Technische Universität Dresden
Work from Home and Health-Related Absenteeism
We study the effect of working from home (WFH) on health-related absenteeism. We draw on a monthly panel (2018–2023) of nearly 1.9 million workers insured under a major German statutory health insurance fund. Our identification strategy leverages the differential exposure to the unexpected shift to WFH in 2020, resulting in about one-quarter of German employees regularly working remotely today. Specifically, our difference-in-differences design compares sick leave take-up across workers with different WFH potential, i.e., the teleworkability of their occupation in February 2020. Our results imply a nontrivial lasting response to WFH. Compared to the pre-treatment mean, the monthly likelihood of sick leave take-up declined by 3.3% by 2023 due to a 10-percentage-point increase in WFH potential (comparable to a shift from performing and entertainment professions to media documentation and information services). These effects are driven by reductions in respiratory infections and musculoskeletal disorders, such as back pain. The response reflects not only behavioral changes in sick leave take-up, but also genuine health improvements. This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting
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Internal Research Seminar - Economics | 01 April - 12:00 PM | Academic Club | Markéta Novotná | Department of Regional Economics
Regional Inequalities in Social Care under Demographic Ageing
This study examines the spatial structure and evolution of social services in the Czech Republic between 2015 and 2024, with particular attention to regional differences and spatial inequalities in service provision. Using administrative data from the Czech Register of Social Service Providers, we analyse the distribution of residential, ambulatory and field-based services at the municipal level, especially those targeting the elderly population. The analysis is conducted using the statistical software R and GIS-based spatial methods, combining spatial accessibility measures with demographic structure and municipal fiscal indicators to examine regional disparities in access and provision. The study situates social service provision within the broader framework of spatial equity, demographic change and regional policy.
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Research Seminar - Economics | 02 April - 2:00 PM | Hybrid meeting room | Botond Kőszegi | Personal website | University of Bonn
Social Responsibility in Secondary Markets
We study how secondary markets for durable goods interact with consumers’ social-responsibility motives to mitigate environmentally harmful new production. On the positive side, secondary markets may allow responsible consumers to acquire used goods that would otherwise be discarded, reducing premature waste. On the negative side, secondary markets introduce two major harmful forces. First, the possibility of buying used goods and thereby causing less harm can raise the demand of responsible consumers, often increasing the production necessary to serve the market. Second, said demand can increase the price of used goods, encouraging purchases of new goods. These forces imply that if used goods have positive private consumption value, then secondary markets always erode the benefits of social responsibility. If, instead, used goods may have negative private value, then secondary markets can enhance or erode the benefits of social responsibility. This event is both online and in person. Join the Teams meeting
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