Author: Paul Hünermund

Trust in Both European and National Institutions is Dangerously Low

Jean-Claude Trichet was visiting ZEW this week and talked about governance in the euro area and the reasons for the sovereign debt crisis. Most of his points we’re not very new to his audience. I guess that’s a good thing and means that by now we have a large consensus about what went wrong. Continue reading Trust in Both European and National Institutions is Dangerously Low

China needs to choose

Almost recovered from a trip to China last week. Actually it was my first time in East Asia. Seeing the impressive economic growth that happened in China close-by is simply amazing. We spent most of the time in Hangzhou–a city with 8 million inhabitants. When you consider that this is a small town for Chinese standards you’re left amazed even more. Continue reading China needs to choose

Europeans don’t seem to like rating agencies that much

This week has been the MaCCI competition and regulation day–a small internal workshop by the people of the Mannheim Center for Competition and Innovation with a lot of interesting papers. Continue reading Europeans don’t seem to like rating agencies that much

It’s a serious problem…

This week, a paper from outside of my field caught my attention. Miguel Sarzosa and Sergio Urzúa study the effect of bullying among teenagers in Korea and find a substantially negative impact on wealth, educational outcomes and life satisfaction. Teenagers that report to have been “severely teased or bantered, threatened, collectively harassed, severely beaten, or robbed” at the age of 15, are 75% more likely to be sick, have a 50% higher chance to suffer from mental health issues and experience 20% higher stress levels in their relationships with friends and parents at the age of 18. Continue reading It’s a serious problem…

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you

These days we had our flagship conference at ZEW: the 5th Annual SEEK Conference. This event is particularly interesting because it brings together high-level policy makers such as Mario Monti (former Prime Minister of Italy, now President of Bocconi University) or Peter Praet (Chief Economist of the ECB) with renowned academics like, among others, Ufuk Akcigit (University of Chicago), Tommaso Valletti (Imperial College London) or James Bessen (Boston University). This year’s topics were innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition policy and how they can contribute to sustained growth. Continue reading Don’t bite the hand that feeds you

How We Started to Study Technological Change

In 1957, Zvi Griliches published a seminal article in innovation economics (“Hybrid Corn: An Exploration in the Economics of Technological Change“), which is based on his PhD thesis. It is safe to say that this piece stands at the beginning of innovation developing into an independent subfield of economics. Besides that, Griliches was also a pioneer in modern style econometric work. In this paper you can clearly see why. It’s a marvellous combination of policy relevant work–he collected a novel data set on US corn production of the time–and advancement in economic theory. Continue reading How We Started to Study Technological Change

Annual Meeting of the German Economic Association

Earlier this week the German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik) had its annual meeting. On the picture above you can see the nice conference venue in Münster. This year’s motto was “Economic development — theory and policy”. Accordingly, I can report from an interesting keynote speech on development economics by Matthias Doepke from Northwestern University. Continue reading Annual Meeting of the German Economic Association

EEA Mannheim 2015 (Part 4)

The last day of the EEA Meeting 2015 again offered a lot of high quality presentations. The highlight of the day was the Nobel session in honor of last year’s laureate Jean Tirole from Toulouse. At the conference dinner in the evening I even had the possibility to meet Prof. Tirole in person and to have a chat at the bar. He’s a very nice guy and very approachable. Continue reading EEA Mannheim 2015 (Part 4)