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In some important multiplayer situations, such as efforts to supply a global public good, players can
choose the game they want to play. In this paper we conduct an experimental test of the decision by a
group with fixed membership, playing over a finite number of periods, to choose between a "tipping"
game, in which every player wants to contribute to the public good provided enough other players
contribute, and a prisoners' dilemma, the classic cooperation game. In the prisoners' dilemma, the
first best outcome is attainable, but cannot be sustained as a Nash equilibrium. In the tipping game,
only a second best outcome may be attainable, but there exists a Nash equilibrium that is strictly
preferred to the one in the prisoners' dilemma. We show that many groups persistently choose the
prisoners' dilemma despite its strategic disadvantage, and that the groups that eventually choose
the tipping game do better than the ones that stick with the prisoners' dilemma.


The work was financially supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the ERC Starting Grant "Human Cooperation to Protect the Global Commons" (HUCO, Project number: 636746).

According to the most recent population forecasts for Switzerland (Bundesamt für Statistik 2015), the share of old-age dependants (older than 65 years) relative to the working age population (20-64) is going to increase from 29.1% in 2015 to 48.1% in 2045. In the same time span, total population is expected to grow from 8.3 million to 10.2 million while the potential workforce is growing from 4.8 million to 5.3 million. As a result, potential labour supply per capita is decreasing and at the same time the share of old-age dependants as well as the average age of the population are increasing rapidly. Among other problems, this is going to lead to significant distortions on labour markets; such as labour shortages or shifts in the structure of labour demand due to shifts in final goods demand. Furthermore, the current political climate in Switzerland tends towards restricting immigration. Since the Swiss economy already relies heavily on foreign workers, a restriction of immigration might aggravate the predicted labour supply shortages even further.

The goal of this research project is to evaluate the consequences of population ageing for the Swiss labour market. A special focus lies on the labour demand side, specifically on medium and long term sectoral and occupational shifts caused by a decrease in (skilled) labour supply and a change in consumer demand structure due to the demographic change. Moreover, the general equilibrium effects of different policy reforms will be evaluated and compared. To achieve this goal we construct a dynamic overlapping generations (OLG) computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of Switzerland and calibrate it with current Swiss data. Models of this type are the conventional approach to evaluating inter- and intra-generational effects of population ageing. However, only few studies focus on the labour market and even fewer emphasise the demand side. The evidence is particularly scarce for Switzerland, where only a handful of general equilibrium analyses relating to population ageing have been conducted.

In order to facilitate estimating realistic parameters of the model as well as calibrating the model to expected short and medium term industry-specific developments we conduct a customised firm level survey, which, on its own, already constitutes a significant contribution to the relevant literature. The finalised model does not only allow us to predict transitional and long-term effects of the demographic change on the economy and the industry structure. It also provides us with the ability to evaluate and compare different reform proposals, such as an increase in the retirement age, reforms of the pension and healthcare systems and different immigration scenarios. As such, we will be able to give recommendations for optimal policy choice and provide valuable inputs to the political debate.

Monetary policy is generally regarded as a central element in the attempts of policy makers to attenuate business-cycle fluctuations. According to the New Keynesian paradigm, central banks are able to stimulate or depress aggregate demand in the short run by adjusting their nominal interest rate targets. The effects of interest rate changes on aggregate consumption, the largest component of aggregate demand, are well understood in the context of this paradigm, on which the canonical "workhorse'' model used in monetary policy analysis is grounded. A key feature of the model is that aggregate consumption is fully described by the amount of goods consumed by a representative household. A decline in the policy rate for instance implies that the real interest rate declines, the representative household saves less and hence increase its demand for consumption. At the same time, general equilibrium effects let labour income grow causing consumption to increase further. However, the mechanism outlined above ignores a considerable amount of empirically-observed heterogeneity among households. For example, households with a higher earnings elasticity to interest rate changes benefit more from a rate cut than those with a lower elasticity; households with large debt positions are at a relative advantage over households with large bond holdings; and households with low exposure to inflation are relatively better off than those holding a sizeable amount of nominal assets. As a result, the contribution to the aggregate consumption response differs substantially across households, implying that monetary expansions and tightenings produce relative "winners'' and relative "losers''.

The aim of the project laid out in this proposal is to give a disaggregated account of the heterogeneous effects of monetary-policy induced interest rate changes on household consumption and a detailed analysis of the channels underlying them. Additionally, it seeks to draw conclusions about the determinants of the strength of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. To do so, it relies on a large panel comprising detailed data from the universe of all households residing in Norway between 1993 and 2015 supplemented with additional micro-data provided by the European Commission. I will be assisted by two project partners, Pascal Paul who is a member of the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Martin Holm who is affiliated with the Research Unit of Statistics Norway and the University of Oslo. In addition, I would like to collaborate with and help train a doctoral student based at the University of Lausanne on this project.

Existing empirical studies of the consumption response to monetary policy at the micro level rely on survey data. Therefore, they are subject to a number of severe data limitations. The surveys employed typically have either no or only a short panel dimension, suffer from attrition, include only limited information on income and wealth, are top-coded, and contain a significant amount of measurement error. The administrative data set provided to us by Statistics Norway suffers from none of these issues, implying that we are in a unique position to evaluate the household-level effects of policy rate changes. In a first step, we use forecasts published by the Norwegian central bank to derive monetary policy shocks that are robust to the simultaneity problem inherent in the identification of the effects of monetary policy following Romer and Romer (2004). We then confront the micro-data with the estimated shocks to study the consumption response along different segments of the income and wealth distribution and to test the importance of heterogeneity in labour earnings, financial income, liquid assets, inflation exposure and interest rate exposure among others. The findings will be of high relevance as they will not only allow us to evaluate channels hypothesised in the analytical literature, improve our understanding of the monetary policy transmission mechanism and its distributional consequences but also serve as a benchmark for structural models built both by theorists and practitioners.