This study uses trade data from Switzerland’s Federal Customs Administration to examine the impact of Covid-19 on international goods trade between January and July 2020. We show that Swiss trade during that period fell by 11% compared to 2019 and that the contraction following the “Federal Lockdown” in mid-March was considerably steeper than the Swiss trade collapse in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008. Examining cross-country variation in Covid-19 cases, the stringency of containment measures, and Swiss trade flows, we document that the pandemic adversely affected both the demand and supply side of foreign trade, while trade restrictions and exchange rate fluctuations played no major role behind the rapid decline of Swiss trade in the first half of 2020.
Does information processing affect individual risk-taking behaviour? This article provides evidence that professional athletes suffer from a left-digit bias when dealing with signals about differences in performance. Using data from the highly competitive field of World Cup alpine skiing for the period of 1992-2014, we show that athletes misinterpret actual differences in race times by focusing on the leftmost digit, which results in increased risk-taking behaviour. For the estimation of causal effects, we exploit the fact that tiny time differences can be attributed to random shocks. We find no evidence that high-stakes situations or individual experience reduce the left-digit bias.
This paper establishes a measure of bilateral differences in values using 857 questions from the World Values Survey. We explore the determinants of value distance, linking it to geography as well as the historical relatedness of populations across 90 countries. Furthermore, we explore the explanatory power of value distance for the diffusion of technological development.
This paper investigates whether biased media attention affects perceptions about future events. We use data on World Cup tournaments in alpine skiing for the period of 1992-2014 and exploit close races as a source of randomness for ranking positions. Since the allocation of media attention is skewed towards the winner and athletes on the podium, we can estimate the causal effect of media attention. Our results document that ranking schemes generate sharp discontinuities in media attention even in close competitions. However, both regression discontinuity and instrumental variables estimates reveal that biased media attention neither affects prices nor quantities in the betting market. We conduct a series of robustness tests to explore the sensitivity of our results.
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