Human capital is transferable across occupations, but only to a limited extent because of differences in occupational skill-profiles. Higher skill overlap between occupations renders less of individuals' human capital useless in occupational switches. Current occupational distance measures...

We analyze the characteristics of new businesses in the German ICT industry, distinguishing them based on their choice between two IPR regimes: open source software (OSS) or closed source software (CSS). The share of new firms with an OSS-based business model has increased considerably over the...

We analyze the spatial diffusion of knowledge in laser technology in West Germany from 1960, when this technology began, until 2005. Laser technology research has been nearly exclusively conducted in regions that are home to a university with a physics or electrical engineering department, an...

We investigate whether the supply of venture capital (VC) is driven by spatial proximity between a VC company and the portfolio firm. Our analysis is based on information about VC investments in Germany between 2004 and 2009. We find that possible problems caused by the geographic distance to a...

When person A makes an offer to person B and B rejects it, then A may "lose face". This loss of face is assumed to occur only if B knows for sure of A's offer. While under some circumstances loss of face can be rationalized by the consequences for future reputation, it may also enter directly...

In Amartya Sen's capability approach, policy makers can focus on different levels to influence the well-being of a society. We argue that improving capability to function as well as absolute levels of functioning achievement should be complemented by attention given to improving individuals'...

People exhibit group reciprocity when they retaliate, not against the person who harmed them, but against somebody else in that person's group. Group reciprocity may be a key motivation behind intergroup conflict. We investigated group reciprocity in a laboratory experiment. After a group...

Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We...

In experiments, people behave more cooperatively when they are aware of an external threat, while in the field, we observe surprisingly high levels of cooperation and altruism within groups in conflict situations such as civil wars. We provide an explanation for these phenomena. We introduce a...

Envy and altruism have been studied extensively in adults. Here, we report data from an experiment studying envious and altruistic behavior in children. We study a sample of German school children aged seven to ten in a natural setting. We run two treatments. One treatment investigates envy, the...