This paper challenges recent results on the fragility of the value of commitment. It introduces a specific notion of the 'value of information' for a later-moving player about the action choice of a previously-moving player, gives conditions under which this value is positive and shows that a...

Credence goods, such as car repairs or medical services, are characterized by severe informational asymmetries between sellers and consumers, leading to fraud in the form of provision of insufficient service (undertreatment), provision of unnecessary service (overtreatment) and charging too much...

In markets where transactions are governed by contractual incompleteness, revealed intentions to evade taxes may affect market performance. We experimentally examine the impact of tax evasion attempts on the performance of credence goods markets, where contractual incompleteness results from...

Out-of-pocket health expenditures (OOPHE) are a substantial source of health care financing even in health care systems with an established role of prepaid financing. The empirical analysis of OOPHE is challenging, because they are fixed in an interaction with other sources of health care...

The sovereign's intention to issue inflation-linked bonds (ILB) is to save money. More than 15 years' experience with this financial instrument in the United States and in several other countries has led to the conclusion that these bonds are costly and basically characterized by low liquidity...

We study in a sample of 1,070 primary school children, aged seven to eleven years, how altruism in a donation experiment is related to children’s risk attitudes and intertemporal choices. Examining such a relationship is motivated by theories of reciprocal altruism that provide a cornerstone...

We investigate the impact of trader and cash inflow on bubble formation in asset markets with a novel design featuring heterogeneous information and a constant fundamental value. Implementing seven treatments we find that (i) only the joint inflow of traders and cash triggers bubbles...

Measuring innovation activities involves critical decisions in selecting appropriate indicators and levels of observation. The present article contributes to the literature on this subject by addressing innovation measurement on the regional level. The dimensionality of regional innovation is...

We estimate the impact of climate change on agricultural production in a panel of 127 countries from 1961 to 2002. In contrast to the existing literature we account for cross-sectional dependence and technology heterogeneity. We find no significant impact of climate change on agricultural...

In this meta-analysis we provide new quantitative evidence on the relationship between the characteristics of working contracts and worker's health. We examine 52 studies covering 26 countries in the time period 1984 - 2010 with a combined sample size of 192. We apply a random effects model...