https://hdl.handle.net/10419/75893 Department of Economics, University of Zurich 2026-09-15T23:21:41Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/339365 Title: (Male) wages in Switzerland, 1750-1860 Authors: Baltensperger, Michael; Chambru, Cédric; Metzler, Jakob; Woitek, Ulrich Abstract: We estimate daily wage rates for skilled and unskilled construction workers and agricultural laborers in Switzerland from 1750 to 1860, a period of profound political and economic transformations. Our analysis is based on 17,700 newly collected wage quotes from primary sources and 23,300 price quotes from primary and secondary sources. We find that wages and prices were remarkably similar among different Swiss regions. We therefore construct price and wage series for the entire territory. Nominal wages remained largely unchanged during the second half of the eighteenth century, rose markedly around 1800 and then held at that level until 1850. Real wages stagnated as a result of rising price levels. Contrary to earlier claims of low Swiss wages, wages in the construction sector were similar to those in neighboring European regions, in particular France and Germany. We quantify the uncertainty in our wage estimates that arises from sampling uncertainty and potentially undocumented in-kind benefits. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/339368 Title: The transmission of reliable and unreliable information Authors: Graeber, Thomas; Noy, Shakked; Roth, Christopher Abstract: Information often spreads and influences beliefs regardless of its reliability. We show that this occurs in part because indicators of reliability are disproportionately lost in the process of word-of-mouth transmission. We conduct controlled experiments where participants listen to economic forecasts and pass them on through voice messages. Other participants listen either to original or transmitted audio recordings and report incentivized beliefs. Across various transmitter incentive schemes, a claim's reliability is lost in transmission more than twice as much as the claim itself. Reliable and unreliable information, once filtered through transmission, impact listener beliefs similarly, substantially reducing the efficiency of downstream decisions. Mechanism experiments show that reliability is lost not because it is perceived as less relevant or harder to transmit, but because it is less likely to come to mind during transmission. Evidence from experiments, a large corpus of everyday conversations, and economic TV news demonstrate that reliability information is less likely to be cued during transmission and that attempts to retrieve it face greater interference in memory. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/339358 Title: Standing in prisoners' shoes: A randomized trial on how incarceration shapes criminal justice preferences Authors: Arman, Arto; Beerli, Andreas; Henkel, Aljosha; Maréchal, Michel André Abstract: We study how incarceration experience shapes preferences for criminal justice policies. In collaboration with a newly opened prison, we conducted a randomized field experiment that o!ered citizens the opportunity to experience up to two days of incarceration, closely replicating the real-life journey of inmates. Providing citizens with a chance to gain firsthand incarceration leads to a significant shift in punitive attitudes, with participants becoming less supportive of harsh criminal justice policies and donating more money to organizations advocating more moderate justice policies. Although individuals overestimated the wellbeing of actual prisoners, the intervention did not alter these beliefs. This suggests that the observed changes in policy preferences are driven more by personal experience than by revised beliefs about the burden of confinement. By randomizing institutional exposure outside the laboratory, our study highlights the causal role of personal experience in the formation of policy preferences. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/339367 Title: Behavioral attenuation Authors: Enke, Benjamin; Graeber, Thomas; Oprea, Ryan; Yang, Jeffrey Abstract: We report the results of over 30 experiments to study the elasticity of economic decisions with respect to fundamentals. Our experiments cover a broad range of domains, from choice and valuation to belief formation, from strategic games to generic optimization problems, involving investment, savings, effort supply, product demand, taxes, externalities, fairness, beauty contests, search, policy evaluation, forecasting and inference. We identify two general patterns. First, behavioral attenuation: in 93% of our experiments, the elasticity of decisions to variation in fundamentals decreases in subjects' cognitive uncertainty about their best decision. Second, diminishing sensitivity: the elasticity of decisions decreases in the distance of the fundamental from 'simple points' at which the best decision is transparent, and this decrease in elasticities is again mirrored by an increase in cognitive uncertainty. These results suggest that cognitive uncertainty systematically predicts an attenuation of economic elasticities, and that there is less (or no) uncertainty and attenuation when problems are cognitively easy. We argue that attenuation links several known decision anomalies, and study its limits. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z