This paper aims at testing whether inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) in policies to promote local business development has a positive impact on local economic performance. We apply two-way fixed effects as well as marginal structural models to a panel data set covering 1,849 Polish...

This paper studies the demand for information about monetary policy, while the literature on central bank transparency and communication typically studies the supply of information by the central bank or the reception of the information provided. We use a new data set on the number of views of...

This paper analyzes the interest rate setting of the European Central Bank (ECB) both before and after the outbreak of the global financial crisis. In the current monetary policy literature, researchers typically select one Taylor rule-based model in order to analyze the interest rate setting of...

Narratives - stories - prevail in social life, however little is known about their relation to economic behavior and outcomes. We shed light on this issue by studying the association between folktales' motifs and economic behavior across the world. First, we explore possible relations between...

Does attendance matter? This question is not only the title of several research papers on this topic but has still not been answered conclusively yet. In general, studies find positive but mostly weak correlations between attendance and performance. However, due to technological changes in...

We analyze the substitutability between brick-and-mortar stores and e-Commerce. Using a novel data set on the German book market we find that between 26 and 55% of the decrease in book sales from 2014-2017 can be explained by the decrease in the number of bookstores. This indicates that...

We empirically analyze the role of e-Commerce and brick-and-mortar retailers in discovering new bestsellers in the book market, using the German market as an example. Using an AR(1)-Process, we find that when a title becomes a bestseller sales increase in e-Commerce and decrease in...

We study how regional productivity differences and labor mobility shape optimal Mirrleesian tax-transfer schemes. When tax schedules are not allowed to differ across regions, productivity-enhancing inter-regional migration exerts a downward pressure on optimal marginal tax rates. When regionally...

A widespread view in the 'political budget cycles' literature is that incumbent politicians seek to influence voters' perceptions of their competence and/or preferences by using the composition of the fiscal budget as a signalling tool. However, little is known about whether voters actually...

Mit der Implementierung des Bestellerprinzips - wer den Makler beauftragt, muss ihn auch bezahlen - hat der Gesetzgeber einen Wechsel der Zahllast fuer die Courtage vom Mieter zum Vermieter vorgenommen. Mit Hilfe eines sequentiellen Verhandlungsspiels wird hier diskutiert, inwieweit der Wechsel...