This paper investigates the effects of trade liberalisation induced labour demand shocks on informal employment in China. We employ a local labour market approach to construct a regional measure of exposure to import tariffs by exploiting initial differences in industrial composition across...

Improving energy efficiency is often considered to be one of the keys to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, efficiency gains also reduce the cost of energy services and may even reduce the price of energy, resulting in energy use rebounding and potential energy use savings being eaten...

We analyze linear, weakest-link and best-shot public goods games in which a distinguished team member, the team allocator, has property rights over the benefits from the public good and can distribute them among team members. These team allocator games are intended to capture natural asymmetries...

We jointly estimate the U.S. business and financial cycle through a unified empirical approach while simultaneously accounting for the role of financial factors. Our approach uses the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition within a medium-scale Bayesian Vector Autoregression. First, we show, both in...

This paper estimates a theory-guided gravity equation of regional patient flows. In our model, a patient’s choice to consult a physician in a particular region depends on a measure of spatial accessibility that accounts for the exact locations of both patients and physicians. Introducing this...

Despite the increasing dominance of digital technology in modern communications, face-to-face interactions are believed to play an irreplaceable role in facilitating complex cross-border business transactions. However, empirical research to identify the impact often faces the challenge of...

This paper studies the role of expected neediness for the formation of mutual support arrangements between households. I predict that under strategic link formation in the context of risk-sharing, households with fewer resources and thus a higher probability to become needy have a higher...

A core mechanism of unified growth theory is that accelerating technological progress induces mass education and, in interaction with child quantity-quality substitution, a decline in fertility. Using unique new data for 21 OECD countries over the period 1750-2000, we test, for the first time,...

We study the robustness of reputation management systems against distortions in rating behavior. In a laboratory trust experiment with reputation management, we mimic a positive bias by exclusively offering the option to rate positively or to give no rating. As predicted by theoretical...

This paper focuses on the 2004 enlargement of the European Union to the East and treats it as a natural experiment to investigate two issues: first, whether there has been a trade creation effect in final and intermediate goods and second, to what extent this effect has been more pronounced for...