Rubinstein (2007) has recently found that the frequency of (types of) decisions made in Internet experiments are related to the time taken for these decisions. Other authors have investigated this relationship by exerting some time pressure. In this paper, I report on an attempt to do the...

Economic page turners like Freakonomics are well written and there is much to be learned from them - not only about economics, but also about writing techniques. Their authors know how to build up suspense, i.e., they make readers want to know what comes. An uncountable number of pages in books...

The notion of face-to-face contacts has recently become very popular in regional economics and in economic geography. This is the most obvious way to explain why firms still locate in proximity to others after the "death of distance", i.e., the shrinking costs for transportation, especially...

Becker and Murphy (1988) constructed, in a well-known paper, a model of rational addiction in which people solve a dynamic optimization problem, choose an optimal timepath of drug consumption and thereby maximize lifetime utility. The model leads to the hypothesis that future consumption is a...

We study the location of various film-related services (such as camera rental, casting agencies or pyrotechnic services), the main determinant of interest being the human capital specificity. We show that firms which supply services with a lower firm specificity locate farther away from one...

This paper reports on an experiment of corruption that was conducted in two treatments: one with the possibility of detection and one without. It turns out that monitoring reduces corruption through deterrence; at the same time, it destroys the intrinsic motivation for honesty. Thus the net effect...

This paper is an attempt to provide evidence on two questions: Why do companies sponsor art events, and where exactly does the money go? We analyse data collected on the revenue structure of cultural institutions in Berlin and Hamburg. This data set not only tells us where the money goes, it...

We study the location of various film-related services (such as camera rental, casting agencies or pyrotechnic services), the main determinant of interest being the human capital specificity. We show that firms which supply services with a lower firm specificity locate farther away from one...