This fall, 1,499 students are enrolled in Econ 101 - looking forward to the semester ahead. 🚀📚

📦 The impact of unconditional cash transfers on poverty and consumption
🤖How the introduction of AI affects worker productivity
🌍The effectiveness of the European emissions trading system

Over the years my Econ 101 class has become much more empirically grounded.
We now discuss:
💘Experimental evidence on supply shocks in dating markets
🗳️How social preferences for redistribution shape voting
💊Unintended consequences of price collusion in the pill market🤰

Weitere Informationen: studentservices.uzh.ch/uzh/anonym/v...

You can read the full paper here:
www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo...

Shan, Zölitz & Backes-Gellner (2025). "Disconnecting Women: Gender Disparities in the Impact of Online Instruction" CESifo Working Paper #11997.

Are these results new?
Our meta-analysis shows that we already knew that online instruction generally hurts performance (avg −0.20 SD), but with a median sample size of 491 observations, most prior work lacked the power to detect the hidden equity cost of online instruction.

Why does online instruction disproportionally harm women? Survey & zoom attendance data show that women more strongly prefer in-person lectures. When assigned more online lectures, they perceive the course as less enjoyable, less comprehensible, and instructors as less engaging.

The negative effect of online instruction on women is concentrated in math-intensive courses and lasting. Here, women exposed to more online earn fewer credits and become more likely to drop out of the program.
🚨🚨🚨

For the first paper documenting a gender gap in the impact of online instruction, we must worry about the possibility of a false positive. It’s not! The gap remains highly precise after multiple-testing corrections (Bonferroni p=0.0036).

More online instruction significantly lowers women’s performance, while leaving men’s unaffected. A 10 ppt shift toward online instruction decreases women’s exam score by 0.038 SD (p<0.001).

IZA has been a key player in shaping labor economics, fostering collaborations, and providing a valuable platform for Economists worldwide.

Hard to accept that IZA will simply vanish.

We have have scheduled 3 flyouts taking place in the second half of January.

We received many excellent applications and have scheduled 11 interviews with candidates that fit the position.