This study examines whether staged project management is beneficial or harmful for making product innovations. Using a unique firm survey for Japan, we find that firms that employed staged project management had a higher likelihood of introducing new products to the market. Additional...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected firms in all economies worldwide. We investigate the impact of the pandemic on firms’ innovation activities. Employing data from a representative sample of German firms, we find consistently with real options theory that negatively affected firms...

A lack of transparency about policy performance can pose a major obstacle to welfare-enhancing policy competition across jurisdictions. In parallel surveys with German citizens and state parliamentarians, we document that both groups misperceive the performance of their state’s education...

We build a textual score measuring the tone of bank earnings press release documents. We use this measure to define bank manager sentiment as the variation in the textual tone score which is orthogonal to bank-specific and macroeconomic fundamentals. Using this definition of sentiment, we...

This paper estimates the effect of heterogeneous university funding stemming from the GermanExcellence Initiative on a regional firm’s probability to innovate by using a multi-valued two-way fixedeffects difference-in-differences model. The estimations show that funding an additional...

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the formation of energy conservation routines. To do so, we use data from two nationwide surveys of German households, conducted before and during the pandemic. Across the two survey waves, we document a significant increase in the likelihood...

In a field experiment with 341 participants, we study whether social comparisons, either in isolation or in combination with a climate-related moral appeal, can change the use of public and car-related transportation. We do so in the context of a mobility budget offered to employees of a large...

Economics and innovation scholars have long recognized the potential of public procurement to trigger innovation. To what extent has this potential been realized so far? What can be done to improve the performance of PPI in this regard? This paper addresses these issues by providing a literature...

The SearchEngine is an open source project providing an integrated framework for diverse matching activities, especially the linkage of large scale firm data by fuzzy criteria like company names and addresses. At its core, it utilizes an efficient candidate retrieval mechanism implementing a...

Actors in various settings have been increasingly relying on algorithmic tools to support their decision-making. Much of the public debate concerning algorithms - especially the associated regulation of new technologies - rests on the assumption that humans can assess the quality of algorithms....