A successful marriage requires for both parties to make investments in their relationship and marital assets. How such assets would be divided if and when the parties divorce is an important factor determining each party’s ex ante investment incentives. Using the incomplete contracting...

Migration between countries with earnings-related and flat-rate pay-as-you-go social security systems may change human capital investments in both countries. The possibility of emigration boosts investments in human capital in the country with flat-rate benefits. Correspondingly, those expecting...

Whether social comparison affects individual well-being is of central importance for understanding behavior in any social environment. Traditional economic theories focus on the role of absolute rewards, whereas behavioral evidence suggests that social comparisons influence well-being and...

This article examines real and nominal wage rigidities in West Germany. Using regionally disaggregated register data for 1975-2001, we estimate the extent of both types of wage rigidities from the observed distribution of individual wage changes, taking into account possible measurement error....

This paper presents a two-sector, North-South model of endogenous growth, where the investment goods sector features learning by doing. There are no technological spillovers across countries that are integrated only via goods markets. In equilibrium, South specializes on the consumption sector....

We examine the degree of trust and trustworthiness in an experimental trust game with 662 participants from six different age groups, ranging from 8-year-olds to retired persons. Although both trust and trustworthiness have been identified as fundamental pillars for efficient economic...

We show experimentally that fairness concerns may have a decisive impact on the actual and optimal choice of contracts in a moral hazard context. Bonus contracts that offer a voluntary and unenforceable bonus for satisfactory performance provide powerful incentives and are superior to explicit...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....