In credence goods markets, experts have better information about the appropriate quality of treatment than their customers. Experts may exploit their informational advantage by defrauding customers. Market institutions have been shown theoretically to be effective in mitigating fraudulent expert...

Credence goods markets with their asymmetric information between buyers and sellers are prone to large inefficiencies. In theory, poorly informed consumers can protect themselves from maltreatment through sellers by asking for second opinions from other sellers. Yet, empirical evidence whether...

Are upper class individuals less ethical? Highly popularized research findings support this notion. This paper provides a novel test to evaluate the relationship between social status and ethical behavior. We successfully prime a large heterogeneous sample of the German population as either high...

We investigate how the experience of extreme events, such as the COVID-19 market crash, influence risk-taking behavior. To isolate changes in risk taking from other factors, we ran controlled experiments with finance professionals in December 2019 and March 2020. We observe that their...

Firms have incentives to influence regulators' decisions. In a dynamic setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the revolving-door channel) than through a hidden payment (i.e., a bribe). This is because the...

We present a natural field experiment designed to examine the extent to which priming can influence the behaviour of sellers in a real world market for credence goods. We employed 40 testers to take 600 taxi journeys in and around Vienna, Austria. Using a between-subject design we vary the...

Based on a small set of assumptions on preferences, Kerschbamer (2015) introduces a geometric delineation of distributional preferences and a parsimonious, non-parametric identification procedure - the Equality Equivalence Test (EET). The assumptions of the test result in a mutually exclusive...

This paper examines the effect of imperfect labor market competition on the efficiency of compensation schemes in a setting with moral hazard and risk-averse agents who have private information on their ability. Two heterogenous firms - characterized by vertical, respectively horizontal,...

We investigate career concerns of financial advisers with a focus on their risk-taking and upward mobility. We use matched employer-employee data for the universe of financial advisers with one well-known national ranking for top financial advisers. We find that at early career stages before...

We consider the labour market for financial advisers in the US using a matched employer-employee data set over the period 2008-2018, in order to examine gender gaps and racial disparities in labour market penalties for financial misconduct. We first show that the measurement of labour market...