Young Economists' Meeting 2023

May 25-26, 2023 in Brno, Czech Republic

Young Economists' Meeting 2023

We thank all presenters and participants who attended the Young Economists' Meeting 2023 in Brno. We would like to thank Lata Gangadharan (Monash Uni) and Jan van Ours (Erasmus University Rotterdam) for their invaluable contributions. We all hope you had fun, learned something new, made contacts, and received feedback on your research. This year we have seen 38 presentations and hosted participants from 24 institutions. The Best Paper Award prize was presented to Biljana Meiske for the paper Queen Bee Immigrant: The Effects of Status Perceptions on Immigration Attitudes.

The picture gallery of the conference is here.
The conference program is here.

Keynote speakers

Lata Gangadharan,

Professor of Economics and Joe Isaac Chair of Business and Economics at Monash University, is an experimental and behavioural economist. A key focus of her research has been on developing novel experimental methods to study economic and social institutions. Her recent research has focused on incentives and preferences and has addressed several topics, including peer sanctioning to mitigate the effects of social and environmental dilemmas, the propensity for prosocial and antisocial behaviour, incentives for compliance and auditing, and gender and social identity. Her recent work has been published in several prestigious academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Science, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Keynote Lecture Title: The gender leadership gap in competitive and cooperative institutions

Abstract: Several factors contribute to the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions. For instance, gender differences in preferences for risk taking, competition, as well as social preferences can create gender differences in leadership positions. Gender differences in evaluations, both by women themselves and by others also play a critical role. Another important element for the success of female leaders is the institutional environment, which will be the focus of the talk. We design a laboratory experiment to examine how the institutional environment (competitive or cooperative) affects the performance and evaluation of male and female leaders. We find that in a competitive environment, women received lower evaluations than men for the same performance and advice, while in a cooperative environment, gender had no impact on evaluations. In addition, men were consistently more willing to take on leadership roles, regardless of the environment. These findings suggest that congruence of the environment with gender stereotypes has important implications for leadership outcomes and that creating more cooperative work environments may help to mitigate the gender leadership gap.

Jan C. van Ours

is widely considered a founding father of European labour economics. His research has centered around imperfect labour markets and sport economics. He is a pioneer in researching the consequences of cannabis consumption on health, education, and labour market outcomes. During his career, he has held positions at several universities in the Netherlands, including Tilburg University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He retired from full-time work at the end of 2020, though he still holds a part-time position at Erasmus School of Economics. He is also an honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. According to IDEAS/RePEc, he is in the top 1% of economists in terms of research output.

Keynote Lecture Title: High temperature – low performance

Abstract: Human beings have a thermal comfort zone with temperatures between 18 and 22°C. Outside this comfort zone, in particular with higher temperatures, work-related activities are negatively affected. Temperature may affect both physical health, including mortality, and mental health. Cold temperatures have a positive effect on mental health while hot temperatures have a negative effect. Sleep disruption may be the primary mechanism through which temperature has a negative effect on mental health. High outdoor temperature may affect mood and cognitive acuity stimulating temper, irritability and other emotions. Bad weather can lead to workers focusing more on their work and, therefore, they are more productive than in case of good weather when they get distracted. Temperature also affects educational performance, i.e., heat may have a negative effect on test scores and therefore on cognitive capacities, with air conditioning at school largely offsets these effects. Temperature has a straightforward effect on human activity: to avoid heat stress the human body needs to reduce the intensity of work if the temperature of the environment becomes too high. In my keynote I will give an overview of recent studies on temperature and economic performance and discuss issues in the research on temperature and economic activities that are still unresolved. For example, it is unclear to what extent outside climate has an effect on indoor work activities. It is also unclear whether the effect of high temperatures affects labor productivity through effects of physiology or psychology. It is also unclear which type of activities are affected most by high temperatures. Labor productivity may go down at high temperatures when workers reduce effort on simple tasks but it may also be that they reduce effort on more complex tasks.