I investigate if, how, and why the effect of a contribution rule in a public goods game depends on how it is implemented: endogenously chosen or externally imposed. The rule prescribes full contributions to the public good backed by a nondeterrent sanction for those who do not comply. My...

Religion is increasingly acknowledged to be a cultural dimension which affects economic outcomes in different regards. This contribution focuses on religion's possible impact on the shadow economy. Different dimensions of the religious markets are taken into account. These dimensions refer to...

In this study we investigate the relationship between religious and charitable giving. We test how income, the tax-price of giving and the German church tax, differently affect charitable donations of church members, individuals leaving church and nonchurch members. We find crowding in between...

Religion is increasingly acknowledged to be a cultural dimension which affects economic outcomes in different regards. This contribution focuses on religion's possible impact on the shadow economy. Different dimensions of the religious markets are taken into account. These dimensions refer to...

International climate negotiations have so far failed to produce ambitious climate cooperation. We combine laboratory experiments with simulations to investigate the performance of two negotiation design features to address this failure: The Paris Agreement's ratchet-up mechanism, which requires...

Microcredit, a financial tool providing uncollateralized loans to low-income individuals, has seen a shift from joint-liability (JL) to individual liabil- ity (IL) lending models. This article tests a theory explaining this shift, focusing on borrowers matching into groups exposed to similar...

Review systems including quantitative measures as well as text-based expression of experiences are omnipresent in today's digital platform economy. This paper studies the existence of reputation inflation, i.e. unjustified increases in ratings, with a special focus of heterogeneity between...

A growing experimental literature studies the endogenous choice of institutions to solve cooperation problems arising in prisoners' dilemmas, public goods games, and common pool resource games. Participants in these experiments have the opportunity to influence the rules of the game before they...

I examine the role of intermediaries on the world's largest peer-to-peer online lending platform. This marketplace as well as other recently opened lending websites allow people to auction microcredit over the internet and are in line with the disintermediation in financial transactions through...

This paper analyses the causal effects of weaker dismissal protection on the incidence of long-term sickness ( six weeks). We exploit a German policy change, which shifted the threshold exempting small establishments from dismissal protection from five to ten workers. Using administrative data,...