Katharina Wedel prepared this study while she was working at the Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2023 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

Recent survey evidence suggests that investors form beliefs about future stock returns by predominantly extrapolating their own experience: They overweight returns they have personally experienced while underweighting returns from earlier years and consequently expect high (low) stock market...

Chapter 1 shows that although near-term financial stability risks have remained contained, mounting vulnerabilities could worsen future downside risks by amplifying shocks, which have become more probable because of the widening disconnect between elevated economic uncertainty and low financial...

This paper examines the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) among German firms, leveraging firm-level data from the ifo Business Survey. We analyze the diffusion of AI across sectors and firm sizes, showing a significant increase in AI usage from 2023 to 2024, particularly in manufacturing...

Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) gewinnt an Bedeutung in der Arbeitswelt. Wie weit ist KI in Unternehmen verbreitet? Wie nehmen Beschäftigte die Entwicklung wahr - besorgt oder zuversichtlich? Wie gehen Arbeitge- ber:innen mit dem Thema um? Die KI-Studie des Exzellenzclusters "The Politics of...

This study evaluates naïve and advanced prediction models when applied to style rotation strategies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (‘JSE’). We apply 1- and 3-month style momentum as naïve predictors against three tree-based machine learning (‘ML’) algorithms (advanced predictors),...