Principal Investigator: Winfried Pohlmeier

This research project focuses on the relationship between personal traits, individual preferences, and economic success. The goal is to achieve a better understanding of individual preference formation and economic decision making incorporating the concept of dual-processing.Personality traits are inherently hard to measure, so empirical approaches should take into account the presence of measurement errors. Most of the empirical approaches adopted thus far rely on simple parametric and linear latent structure models. More recently, Bayesian factor structure models have been proposed which allow the researcher to tackle both the measurement error problem and the endogeneity problem. Moreover, the Bayesian approach allows for analyzing models with large number of measurements and factors, which can be selected endogenously by appropriate parsimonious Bayesian factor selection techniques.The empirical studies will be based on large scale panel data using econometric models for nonexperimental evaluation of causal treatment effects and Bayesian factor models. The project will also contribute to a methodological advancement of these models.

Publications

• A simple and successful shrinkage method for weighting estimators of treatment effects. Winfried Pohlmeier, Ruben Seiberlich, and Selver Derya Uysal, 2014, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, in press.
  
• Semiparametric decomposition of the gender achievement gap: An application for Turkey. Z. Eylem Gevrek and Ruben R. Seiberlich, 2014, Labour Economics, Vol. 31, pp. 27–44.
  

Working Papers

• Do Personality Traits Play a Role in a Female Labor Participation? Jana Mareckova, 2015.

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