We investigate the hypothesis of failed integration and low social mobility of immigrants. An intergenerational assimilation model is tested empirically on household survey data and validated against administrative data provided us by the Italian Embassy in Germany. Although we confirm...

Does redistribution in democracies cater to the will of the majority? We propose a direct empirical strategy based on survey data that needs not assume that voters are guided by pecuniary motives alone. We find that most democracies implement the median voter's preferred amount of redistribution...

Recent laboratory evidence suggests that personality traits, in particular social preferences, may affect contractual outcomes under moral hazard. Using the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004 we find that behaviour of employers and employees is consistent with the presence of...

We use more than 63,000 datapoints from a German used car market website to document systematic and substantial price drops at vintage (= year of first registration) thresholds and 10,000 km odometer marks. The latter finding replicates the findings in Lacetera et al. (2012), whereas the first...

The behavioral relevance of non-binding defaults is well established. While most research has focused on decision makers' responses to a given default, we argue that this individual decision making perspective is incomplete. Instead, a comprehensive understanding of default effects requires to...

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to...

We provide an overview over different literature streams that aim at explaining the origin of persistent productivity differences across organization by variation in the use of management practices. We focus on human resource management (HRM) practices, document gaps in the literature, and show...

This paper analyzes firms' choices regarding the geographic scope of patent protection within the European patent system. We develop an econometric model at the patent level to quantify the impact of office fees and translation costs on firms' decision to validate a patent in a particular...

We analyze a rating agency's incentives to distort ratings in a model with a monopolistic profit maximizing rating agency, a continuum of heterogeneous firms, and a competitive market of risk-neutral investors. Firms sell bonds, the value of a firm's bond is known to the firm and observable by...

We consider a software vendor first selling a monopoly platform and then an application running on this platform. He may face competition by an entrant in the applications market. The platform monopolist can benefit from competition for three reasons. First, his profits from the platform...