We conduct a representative survey experiment in Germany to understand why people support inefficient policies. In particular, we measure beliefs about and preferences for rent control - a policy that is widely regarded as harmful by experts. To tease out causal mechanisms, we provide randomly...

We conducted two large-scale, highly powered randomized controlled trials intended to encourage consumer debt repayments. In Study 1, we implemented five treatments varying the design of envelopes sent to debtors. We did not find any treatment effects on response and repayment rates compared to...

Understanding the global energy network and the developments of energy efficiency is key to advance energy regulation and fight climate change. We develop a global panel dataset on energy usage inventories based on territorial production, final production and consumption over 1997-2014. We apply...

Large, macroeconomic shocks in the past have been shown to influence economic decisions in the present. We study in an experiment with 743 subjects whether small-scale, seemingly negligible, events also affect the formation of risk preferences. In line with a reinforcement learning model, we...

Bankruptcy restructuring procedures are used in most legal systems to decide the fate of businesses facing financial hardship. We study how bargaining failures in such procedures impact the economic performance of participating firms in the context of Croatia, which introduced a "pre-bankruptcy...

Previous work has shown that unobservable random shocks on output have a detrimental effect on effort provision in short-term ('static') employment relationships. Given the prevalence of long-term ('dynamic') relationships in firms, we investigate whether the impact of shocks is similarly...

We present experimental evidence for decision settings where public good providers compete for endogenous donations offered by outside donors. Donors receive benefits from public good provision but cannot provide the good themselves. The performance of three competition mechanisms is examined in...

We study a randomly-assigned program providing information on U.S. settlement for new Filipino immigrants. The intervention, a 2.5-hour pre-departure training and an accompanying paper handbook, has no effect on employment, settlement, and subjective wellbeing, but leads immigrants to acquire...

Public procurement contracts (PPCs) of goods, services and works is about one tenth of global gross domestic product. Much research has been conducted on government spending and its aggregate effects, but evidence is scarce at the micro-level. This study exploits sealed-bid PPC auctions of...

In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a datagenerating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in sample estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidencegenerating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation...