Discussion Paper No. 579
July 5, 2026
Ports, Technology and Inter-City Trade: The Economics and Geopolitics of Evolving Maritime Transport Networks
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Abstract:
Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and shipping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granular data—digitized historical shipping records, georeferenced ship movements, and shipment-level routing information—we present five stylized facts on the structure and evolution of the maritime network. Global shipping activity is highly concentrated among a changing lineup of dominant top ports even as lower-ranked ports disperse, while state-owned Chinese port terminal operators increasingly account for these global volumes, boosting overall port operations while delivering efficiency gains mostly to Chinese vessels. We use these facts to organize a synthesis of a fast-growing literature: containerization reshaped which port cities could expand, reinforced hub-and-spoke concentration that yields large but localized welfare gains, embedded ports in multimodal networks that amplify the returns to infrastructure, and generated market power, congestion, and environmental costs. Together, this evidence shows how evolving maritime technologies simultaneously deepen global integration and heighten the economic and geopolitical importance of critical nodes in the transport network—and of who controls them.
Keywords:
transport networks; ports; international trade; trade costs; containerization; geoeconomics;
JEL-Classification:
F13; F14; R41; R42;
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Discussion Paper No. 578
Different Consumption Responses to Equivalent Changes in the Real Interest Rate
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We study how individuals adjust consumption in response to changes in the real interest rate using a large, preregistered, within-subject survey experiment on a representative sample of the German population. Respondents evaluate hypothetical scenarios in which the real interest rate rises by five percentage points through either an increase in the nominal interest rate or an equivalent decline in inflation. While classic intertemporal choice models predict identical responses across these scenarios, we find a clear asymmetry: respondents plan sizable cuts in consumption, higher saving, and lower borrowing when nominal rates increase, yet adjust these margins much less when inflation falls. Differences in perceived wealth effects may contribute to this asymmetry, but they cannot fully explain it. Rising nominal interest rates appear to provide stronger incentives to increase saving and avoid borrowing than does declining inflation. Declining inflation is also associated with more contradictory choices, for example, reporting higher consumption and higher saving while leaving borrowing unchanged. Together, these findings suggest that respondents more readily internalize the consequences of nominal interest rate changes than of disinflation, which has implications for the design and communication of monetary policy.
Keywords:
consumption; real interest rate; inflation expectations; survey;
JEL-Classification:
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Discussion Paper No. 577
June 14, 2026
Matching for Risk-Taking: Overconfident Bankers and Government-Protected Banks
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We set up a simple theoretical model in which banks with varying degrees of government support are matched with CEOs that have different degrees of overconfidence. The channel through which the matching occurs is the share of bonus payments offered by banks in their profit-maximizing contracts. This yields a sequence of hypotheses when CEOs can freely choose risk levels: banks with more government support incentivize their CEOs more and this disproportionately attracts overconfident CEOs. In equilibrium this in turn leads to an assortative matching between overconfident managers and banks with a larger bailout probability. We then test the hypotheses derived from this model for U.S. data spanning both the Great Financial Crisis and the Covid Crisis. Our results confirm the hypotheses from our theoretical model for normal years, but not during crises and periods of enhanced regulation.
Keywords:
matching; overconfidence; incentive contracts; bailouts;
JEL-Classification:
G21; G28; H32;
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Discussion Paper No. 576
Motivating Crowdworkers with Nonmonetary Incentives and Payment Framing—Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment
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An increasing number of individuals worldwide are participating in crowdwork and tele-work. They often perform tasks such as AI training and content moderation. While these tasks are typically conducted in large quantities and often involve routine elements, their nature makes them inherently demanding. They require high levels of engagement or creativity and produce outputs of subjective quality that are difficult to measure. In a preregistered field experiment involving over 5,500 crowdworkers, we examined the impact of automated recognition and work-appreciation phrases and payment framing on motivation, performance, and job satisfaction. The results indicate that recognition—automated phrases: Great work! You did a good job! Nice job! Well done!—positively influences subjective job satisfaction, and that loss-framed payment is somewhat more effective than gain framing. Overall, the treatments have little effect on objective and subjective performance and moti-vation.
Keywords:
crowdworkers; complex tasks; routine; automated motivation; nonmonetary incentives; recognition and appreciation; loss and gain framework; experiment;
JEL-Classification:
J33; J24; M54; M52; D83; C93;
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Discussion Paper No. 575
June 3, 2026
Talking Across the Aisle
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We conduct an experiment that engages U.S. Democrats and Republicans in video conversations about policy-relevant facts. We study self-selection into conversations and their effect on information aggregation and affective polarization. Participants prefer co-partisan conversations, believing cross-partisan conversations to be less informative and less pleasant. There is more to learn from counter-partisans, but participants find it harder to extract knowledge from them. Our rich audiovisual data reveal that co- and cross-partisan conversations are strikingly similar in content and tone. Yet, knowledge extraction is impeded by participants' persistent lack of trust in the knowledge of counter-partisans. In contrast, cross-partisan interactions prove more enjoyable than anticipated and significantly reduce affective polarization, an effect that persists in an obfuscated follow-up survey three months later. More emotionally engaged conversations produce larger reductions in affective polarization. Policies encouraging cross-partisan interactions may be more successful at reducing affective polarization than at promoting information aggregation.
Keywords:
cross-partisan interactions; partisan sorting; echo chambers; information diffusion; affective polarization; misperceptions;
JEL-Classification:
C93; D83; D9;
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Discussion Paper No. 574
June 1, 2026
Social Anxiety and Evaluative Interviews
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Evaluative social interactions are pervasive in labor markets. Inequality in these settings can arise not only from how individuals are treated or perform when evaluated, but from whether they enter evaluation at all. We study these margins in the context of social anxiety. In a controlled online experiment (N = 922), applicants decide whether to complete a live video interview that determines a monetary hiring bonus. We find that inequities associated with social anxiety are concentrated in participation rather than in performance or treatment. Socially anxious applicants are substantially less willing to interview, hold more pessimistic beliefs about being hired, and correctly anticipate a worse experience. Yet they perform no worse and are evaluated no differently. Interview experience does not attenuate the relative pessimism of socially anxious individuals, a pattern that is inconsistent with Bayesian updating under comparable signals. We use our rich audio-visual data and open-ended reflection texts to show that, instead, socially anxious applicants interpret similar interactions more negatively. We then provide evidence on organizational interventions aimed at closing social anxiety gaps. Finally, we show that social anxiety explains a meaningful share of inequalities commonly attributed to gender and social skill differences and is associated with significant earnings gaps in national data.
Keywords:
social anxiety; job interviews; beliefs; mental health; discrimination; learning;
JEL-Classification:
D83; J71; I10; C90;
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Discussion Paper No. 573
May 21, 2026
Private Interest in the Public Good: Cholera and the Origins of Sanitary Reform
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European countries paved the way for modern economic growth in the 19th century with large-scale reforms facilitating human capital accumulation. The literature has looked at the role of elites in broad education investments, but less attention has been devoted to reforms promoting workers' health, a key component of human capital. This paper studies the impact of the 1866 cholera outbreak on modern waterworks construction in the German Empire to test the hypothesis whether concerns about workers' health may have compelled elites to invest in health-enhancing public goods. We find that the epidemic raised the annual probability of building waterworks by about 35%. Exogenous variation relying on the cholera-spreading effect of military movements during the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 further underpins this result. Quantitative and qualitative evidence indicates that non-agricultural elites employing more productive capital and better-skilled workers pushed for reform to avoid the costly prospect of future labour shocks. Long-term analyses show sizeable and persisting effects of the epidemic on public health and development outcomes shortly before the First World War.
Keywords:
political economy; public goods; sanitation; cholera; elites;
JEL-Classification:
H41; H54; I18; N33; N93;
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Discussion Paper No. 572
May 14, 2026
Some Simple Economics of Green Markets
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Policymakers seek to reduce environmentally harmful production by leveraging consumers' demand for low-externality products. Should the exchange of such products be organized under the standard principle of ``one market for one good", creating a separate market for green goods and integrating regional green markets? We show that this reduces harmful production if and only if green demand is sufficiently strong relative to green supply. Otherwise, a ``demand displacement effect" arises: stronger demand for green goods induces substitution toward brown goods, thereby increasing externalities. This effect interacts with other policy instruments.
Keywords:
green markets; socially responsible consumers; externalities; market segmentation; demand displacement; environmental policy;
JEL-Classification:
D62; D64; Q58;
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Discussion Paper No. 571
April 29, 2026
Housing Supply, Property Insurance, and Exposure to Wildfire Risk
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In the past two decades, about half of the new homes in the United States were built in areas at risk of natural hazards. Why is residential development exposed to such risk? I argue that regulated property-insurance pricing and land-use regulations contribute to this pattern. I study this mechanism in the metropolitan area of San Diego, California, where insurance rules compress the premium gradient with respect to wildfire risk and safer locations are highly regulated and built out. Using detailed spatial data on zoning, wildfire risk, housing, commuting, and premiums, I estimate a quantitative urban model of household location choice, housing supply, and insurance supply. The estimates imply that wildfire premiums are 10.5% below actuarially fair pricing, that the average amenity cost of current wildfire risk is equivalent to 3.5% of income, and that the total present-value welfare cost of current wildfire risk, including property damages, is $17.5 billion. This aggregate cost masks substantial incidence heterogeneity, as owners of safe land benefit from equilibrium scarcity effects. Counterfactuals show that housing supply and insurance pricing interact in determining incidence. In the benchmark specification, targeted housing reforms leave the aggregate effect of cost-based insurance nearly unchanged while attenuating its burden on workers: relative to baseline, workers' wildfire costs rise by 2.3% under insurance reform alone, but fall by 0.9% under the joint reform.
Keywords:
climate; environment; natural disasters; wildfires; spatial; urban; land-use regulation; zoning;
JEL-Classification:
O18; Q54; Q56; R23; R31; R52;
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Discussion Paper No. 570
April 15, 2026
Open Science in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften: Transparenz, Reproduzierbarkeit und Zugang
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Der Beitrag diskutiert Open Science in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften als Bündel von Praktiken zur Verbesserung von Transparenz, Reproduzierbarkeit und Zugänglichkeit wissenschaftlicher Forschung. Der Artikel zeigt, dass Präregistrierungen und Registered Reports, Open Data und Open Code sowie Open Access die Glaubwürdigkeit empirischer Forschung stärken können, zugleich aber disziplinspezifische Grenzen und Zielkonflikte berücksichtigen müssen. Für die Wirtschaftswissenschaften und die Forschungsförderung folgt daraus die Notwendigkeit verlässlicher Infrastrukturen, klarer Standards und nachhaltiger institutioneller Unterstützung, insbesondere für nicht-kommerzielle Open-Access-Modelle wie Diamond Open Access.
Keywords:
open science; präregistrierung; reproduzierbarkeit; open access;
JEL-Classification:
B41; C81; I23;