arXiv subjects

Dominic Rohner

Publications and source records attributed to Dominic Rohner.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Science under Threat? A Natural Experiment in Economics

Academic freedom has come under growing strain worldwide. To study whether and how academics respond to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the publication in early 2025 of a "blacklist" of words flagged by the U.S. government. We find that the release of this list led to a sharp reduction in the use of these flagged words among economists at universities that rely heavily on federal funding, relative to scholars from institutions that are less dependent on federal funding or based in the UK. The drop is driven by content related to gender, race, and environment. We show that changes are not simply semantic but reflect actual paper content and that neither the individual funding status nor time-invariant author characteristics are driving the effects. We also document interesting heterogeneous effects by department quality and author gender and ethnicity. Our findings are consistent with the idea that scholars respond strongly to political pressure.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

Hungry Professors? Decision Biases Are Less Widespread than Previously Thought

In many situations people make sequences of similar, but unrelated decisions. Such decision sequences are prevalent in many important contexts including judicial judgments, loan approvals, college admissions, and athletic competitions. A growing literature claims that decisions in such sequences may be severely biased because decision outcomes seem to be systematically affected by the scheduling. In particular, it has been argued that mental depletion leads to harsher decisions before food breaks and that the ``law of small numbers'' induces decisions to be negatively auto-correlated (i.e. favorable decisions are followed by unfavorable ones and vice versa). These findings have attracted much academic and media attention and it has been suspected that they may only represent the ``tip of the iceberg''. However, voices of caution point out that existing studies may suffer from serious limitations, because the decision order is not randomly determined, other influencing factors are hard to exclude, or direct evidence for the underlying mechanisms is not available. We exploit a large-scale natural experiment in a context in which the previous literature would predict the presence of scheduling biases. Specifically, we investigate whether the grades of randomly scheduled oral exams in Law School depend on the position of the exam in the sequence. Our rich data enables us to filter-out student, professor, day, and course-specific features. Our results contradict the previous findings and suggest that caution is advised when generalizing from previous studies for policy advice.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

Power in the Pipeline

This paper provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the role of natural gas for the domestic and international distribution of power. The crucial role of pipelines for the trade of natural gas determines a set of network effects that are absent for other natural resources such as oil and minerals. Gas rents are not limited to producers but also accrue to key players occupying central nodes in the gas network. Drawing on our new gas pipeline data, this paper shows that gas betweenness-centrality of a country increases substantially the ruler's grip on power as measured by leader turnover. A main mechanism at work is the reluctance of connected gas trade partners to impose sanctions, meaning that bad behavior of gas-central leaders is tolerated for longer before being sanctioned. Overall, this reinforces the notion that fossil fuels are not just poison for the environment but also for political pluralism and healthy regime turnover.

econ.GN↗