On Friday, May 29th, Jan Fidrmuc from Brunel University presented his recent research paper titled “Happiness and Religion” coauthored with Çiğdem Börke Tunalı from Istanbul University to the ISET Community. This was not Mr Fridrmuc’s first visit to ISET, he has already presented very interesting works about Friday the 13th superstition and persistence of social capital.
At the beginning of the presentation, Mr. Fidrmuc explained utility of religion and the ways religion may affect human happiness. He reflected on possible costs associated with religion. Authors use five ways of the European Social Survey in their study, covering 2000 to 2008, to analyze the effect of religion on happiness.
On Wednesday, May 27th, Maryam Naghsh Nejad from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA-Bonn) presented her work in progress “Children of Afghan Migrants in Iran” to the ISET community. The study tries to identify whether there are disparities between Iranian natives and Afghan immigrants and what the sources of these discrepancies are.
As Ms. Naghsh Nejad pointed out, Afghan refugees are one of the largest displaced population in the world. According to the data retrieved for 2012, there were between 2.4 to 3 million Afghan immigrants living in Iran. Afghan refugees started to arrive in Iran from 1978, in several different waves. Iran, a host country, did accept Afghan refugees but its policy towards these people has never been stable.
On Monday, May 18th, ISET hosted Mr. Jan Klingelhöfer from RWTH Aachen University who presented his paper titled “The Swing Voters' Blessing" to the ISET community. The paper deals with the following question: can democracy work well if the electorate is neither fully informed nor fully rational?
In order to answer this question, Mr. Klingelhöfer gave an affirmative answer in a model with quality differences between two ideological candidates running for office. The candidates commit to policy platforms before an election takes place. All voters care about the quality of the candidates as well as the policies they offer. However, the quality differences are only observable to a limited number of informed voters.
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