Wissenschaft lebt vom Austausch kluger Köpfe über Grenzen hinweg. IWH-Ökonom Simon Wiederhold hat vier Wochen an der Stanford University geforscht. Einblicke in eine höchst anregende Erfahrung.

We investigate public preferences for equity-enhancing policies in access to early child care, using a survey experiment with a representative sample of the German population (n ≈ 4, 800). We observe strong misperceptions about migrant-native inequalities in early child care that vary by respondents’ age and right-wing voting preferences. Randomly providing information about the actual extent of inequalities has a nuanced impact on the support for equity-enhancing policy reforms: it increases support for respondents who initially underestimated these inequalities, and tends to decrease support for those who initially overestimated them. This asymmetric effect leads to a more consensual policy view, substantially decreasing the polarization in policy support between under- and overestimators. Our results suggest that correcting misperceptions can align public policy preferences, potentially leading to less polarized debates about how to address inequalities and discrimination.

The chief human resource officer (CHRO) role elevates people-related matters to the apex of the firm. Why do some companies’ leading management teams place so much emphasis on human resources while others do not? The present study argues that CHROs’ presence in the C-suite is driven by firms’ imitation of industry peers’ leadership structures as a response to uncertainty. The investigation also sheds light on the moderating role of environmental factors that can influence mimetic isomorphism in HR leadership. Through a longitudinal analysis of large listed firms between 2006 and 2020, the study shows a positive relationship between the prevalence of the CHRO position among firms’ peers and a focal firm having a CHRO in its top management. The results demonstrate that certain types of uncertainty serve as boundary conditions for such copying actions: Industry growth strengthens mimicking behavior while industry dynamism weakens it. There is no clear evidence for the moderating role of industry competition. The findings contribute a neo-institutional view of human resource structures in the top management and strengthen the bond between the strategy and human resource literature.

This paper investigates the critical role of church membership in the process of economic recovery after high-impact natural disasters. We document a significant adverse treatment effect of the 2005 hurricane season in the Southeastern United States on establishment-level productivity. However, we find that establishments in counties with higher rates of church membership saw a significantly stronger recovery in terms of productivity for 2005–10. We also show that church membership is correlated with post-disaster entrepreneurship activities and population growth.

This paper surveys recent advances in drawing structural conclusions from vector autoregressions (VARs), providing a unified perspective on the role of prior knowledge. We describe the traditional approach to identification as a claim to have exact prior information about the structural model and propose Bayesian inference as a way to acknowledge that prior information is imperfect or subject to error. We raise concerns from both a frequentist and a Bayesian perspective about the way that results are typically reported for VARs that are set-identified using sign and other restrictions. We call attention to a common but previously unrecognized error in estimating structural elasticities and show how to correctly estimate elasticities even in the case when one only knows the effects of a single structural shock.