The market for retail financial products (e.g. investment funds or insurances) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned,...

Is the activity of volunteering something that benefits the volunteer as well as the recipient of the volunteer's activities? We analyze this relationship and apply matching estimators to the large-scale British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set to estimate the causal impact of volunteering...

We compare the performance of liability rules for managing environmental disasters when third parties are harmed and cannot always be compensated. A firm can invest in safety to reduce the likelihood of accidents. The firm's investment is unobservable to authorities. Externality and asymmetric...

In the market where inattentive buyers can fail to notice some feasible choices, the key role of marketing is to make buyers aware of products. However, the effective marketing strategy is often subtle since marketing tactics can make buyers cautious. This paper provides a framework to analyze...

We define and experimentally test a public provision mechanism that meets three basic ethical requirements and allows community members to influence, via monetary bids, which of several projects is implemented. For each project, participants are assigned personal values, which can be positive or...

This study analyzes the impact of entrepreneurship education at universities on the intentions of students to become entrepreneurs or self-employed in the short-term (immediately after graduation) and in the long-term (five years after graduation). A difference-in-differences approach is applied...

Banning deception in economic experiments does not exclude experiments with participants in the role of experimenters who can gain by deceiving those in the role of participants. We compare treatments with and without possible deception by experimenter-participants to test whether deception...

We consider three-person envy games with a proposer, a responder, and a dummy player. In this class of games, the proposer, rather than allocating a constant pie, chooses the pie size which the responder can then accept or reject while the dummy player can only refuse his own share. While the...

Drawing on representative household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine the role of an early precursor of entrepreneurial development - parental role models - for the individual decision to become self-employed in the post-unified Germany. The findings suggest that the...

Engel's law is known to be extraordinarily consistent across time and space. Accordingly, it has been widely used to determine poverty. However, also among the poorest, a certain amount of non food spending is necessary. To substantiate the distinction between necessities and luxuries, already...