Journal: Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series

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ETH Zurich, Center for Law & Economics

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2018 - 2019112020 - 202579
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Publications 1 - 10 of 90
  • Do I Trust this Stranger? Generalized Trust and the Governance of Online Communities
    Item type: Working Paper
    Hergueux, Jérôme; Algan, Yann; Benkler, Yochai; et al. (2022)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
  • Can Paying Employees to Quit Boost Motivation? Evidence from a Lab Experiment
    Item type: Working Paper
    Focacci, Chiara Natalie; Gesche, Tobias; Kim, Henry; et al. (2025)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
    We investigate whether pay-to-quit incentives can enhance worker productivity by conducting an online laboratory experiment with 1,000 participants. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a control condition, which offered no financial inducement to quit, or to a treatment condition in which they received a one-time offer of CHF 5 to exit the task. Our findings indicate that participants who reject the quit offer complete, on average, 33% more tasks than those in the control group. The evidence suggests that the foregone quit payment establishes a salient reference point, thereby inducing increased effort and a higher likelihood of surpassing performance thresholds. This study contributes to both behavioral decision research and the practice of personnel management by elucidating how a seemingly counterintuitive incentive can have dual effects: screening out less committed employees and motivating those who remain to invest greater effort.
  • The Unintended Consequences of Pandemic Lockdowns: Evidence on Domestic Violence in Italy
    Item type: Working Paper
    Bochenkova, Alena; Buonanno, Paolo; Deiana, Claudio; et al. (2024)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
    This study examines the effects of Italy’s COVID-19 tiered lockdown system on domestic violence. The policy implemented categorizes regions into different weekly risk levels, imposing corresponding mobility restrictions—the higher the risk, the greater the constraints on mobility outside the home. Leveraging this setting, we employ a difference-in-differences approach with staggered treatment adoption and heterogeneous treatment effects to assess the causal impact of these measures. Our findings reveal a significant increase in domestic violence reporting via helpline, persisting up to five weeks following the intervention, in regions subjected to the highest level of mobility restrictions. Additionally, we observe a heightened likelihood of femicides occurring in the same week the mobility restrictions were enacted. This study contributes new insights into the dynamics of domestic violence under pandemic-related restrictions, highlighting the exacerbated risks associated with prolonged lockdowns.
  • Media Slant is Contagious
    Item type: Working Paper
    Widmer, Philine; Galletta, Sergio; Ash, Elliott; et al. (2020)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
    This paper examines the diffusion of media slant, specifically how partisan content from national cable news affects local newspapers in the U.S., 2005-2008. We use a text-based measure of cable news slant trained on content from Fox News Channel (FNC), CNN, and MSNBC to analyze how local newspapers adopt FNC’s slant over CNN/MSNBC’s. Our findings show that local news becomes more similar to FNC content in response to an exogenous increase in local FNC viewership. This shift is not limited to borrowing from cable news, but rather, local newspapers’ own content changes. Further, cable TV slant polarizes local news content.
  • The Advisory and Monitoring Roles of the Board
    Item type: Working Paper
    Croci, Ettore; Hertig, Gerard; Khoja, Layla; et al. (2020)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
  • Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice
    Item type: Working Paper
    Ash, Elliott; Chen, Daniel L.; Naidu, Suresh (2019)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
    This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the effects of the early law-and- economics movement on the U.S. judiciary. We focus on the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges, an intensive economics course that trained almost half of federal judges between 1976 and 1999. Using the universe of published opinions in U.S. Circuit Courts and 1 million District Court criminal sentencing decisions, we estimate the within-judge effect of Manne program attendance. Selection into attendance was limited _ the program was popular across judges from all backgrounds, was regularly oversubscribed, and admitted judges on a first-come first-served basis _ and results are robust to a variety of automatically selected covariates predicting the timing of attendance. We find that after attending economics training, participating judges use more economics language in their opinions, rule against regulatory agencies more often, and impose more/longer criminal sentences. The Manne program played a role in reinforcing the policy consequences of the law-and-economics movement via its influence on U.S. federal judges.
  • Having Your Day in Robot Court
    Item type: Working Paper
    Chen, Benjamin; Stremitzer, Alexander; Tobia, Kevin P. (2021)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
  • Mindfulness Reduces Information Avoidance
    Item type: Working Paper
    Ash, Elliott; Sgroi, Daniel; Tuckwell, Anthony; et al. (2021)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
    Mindfulness meditation has been found to influence various important outcomes such as health, stress, depression, productivity, and altruism. We report evidence from a randomised controlled trial on a previously untested effect of mindfulness: information avoidance. We find that a relatively short mindfulness treatment (two weeks, 15 minutes a day) is able to induce a statistically significant reduction in information avoidance – that is, avoiding in formation that may cause worry or regret. Supplementary evidence supports mindfulness’s effects on emotion regulation as a possible mechanism for the effect.
  • Race-related Research in Economics: Volume, Content and Publication Incentives
    Item type: Working Paper
    Advani, Arun; Ash, Elliott; Boltachka, Anton; et al. (2024)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
    Issues of racial justice and economic inequalities across racial and ethnic groups have risen to the top of public debate. Economists’ ability to contribute to these debates is based on the body of race-related research. We study the volume and content of race-related research in economics and examine the implicit incentives to produce such work. We do so for a corpus of 225 000 economics publications from 1960 to 2020 to which we apply an algorithmic approach to classify race-related work, and construct paths to publication for 22 000 NBER and 10 000 CEPR working papers posted over the last few decades. We present three new facts. First, since 1960 less than 2% of economics publications have been race-related, with such work being balkanized into a few …elds and largely absent from many others. There is an uptick in such work in the mid 1990s. Among the top-5 journals this is driven by the AER, QJE and the JPE. Econometrica and the REStud have each cumulatively published fewer than 15 race-related articles since 1960. Second, on content, while over 50% of race-related publications in the 1970s focused on Black individuals, by the 2010s this had fallen to 20%. There has been a steady decline in the share of race-related research on discrimination since the 1980s, with a rise in the share of studies on identity. Finally, irrespective of …eld, race related working papers do not have worse publication outcomes compared to non race-related working papers, in terms of publication likelihood, quality of publication, publication lags and citations. Hence conditional on working papers being produced, the publications process provides little disincentive to work on race-related issues. We discuss policy implications stemming from our …ndings on economists’ ability to contribute to debates on race and ethnicity in the economy.
  • Evolution vs. Creationism in the Classroom: The Lasting Effects of Science Education
    Item type: Working Paper
    Arold, Benjamin W. (2022)
    Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
    Anti-scientific attitudes can impose substantial costs on societies. Can schools be an important agent in mitigating the propagation of such attitudes? This paper investigates the effect of the content of science education on anti-scientific attitudes, knowledge, and choices. The analysis exploits staggered reforms that reduce or expand the coverage of evolution theory in US state science education standards. I compare adjacent cohorts in models with state and cohort fixed effects and conduct fine-grained placebo tests to rule out scientific, religious and political confounders. There are three main results. First, expanded evolution coverage increases students’ knowledge about evolution. Second, the reforms translate into greater evolution belief in adulthood, but do not crowd out religiosity or affect political attitudes. Third, the reforms affect high-stakes life decisions, namely the probability of working in life sciences.
Publications 1 - 10 of 90