Social insurance such as unemployment insurance is in many countries mandatory for the majority of workers. The extent of such insurance is determined by a political process, i.e. ultimately by the workers themselves. If unemployment were purely accidental then all risk averse workers should...

Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in both positively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variables of social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurs who are...

The self-employed faced strong income losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many governments introduced programs to financially support the self-employed during the pandemic, including Germany. The German Ministry for Economic Affairs announced a €50bn emergency-aid program in March 2020,...