We study how students’ social networks emerge by documenting systematic patterns in the process of friendship formation of incoming students; these students all start out in a new environment and thus jointly create a new social network. As a specific novelty, we consider cooperativeness, time...

We analyse data from a field setting in which students participate in a dynamic group contest with feedback. We combine this information with a laboratory measure of competitiveness. We ?nd that competitive groups perform worse overall. In addition, we find that participants react to...

We show that market discipline, defined as the extent to which firm specific risk characteristics are re ected in market prices, eroded during the recent financial crisis in 2008. We design a novel test of changes in market discipline based on the relation between firm specific risk...

This paper empirically analyzes how performance feedback and information on heterogeneity affect behavior in dynamic contests, using data on two-player-contests from a smartphone/tablet application called ``Wordblitz for Friends''. We find that players increase output as underdogs and decrease...

This paper tests social identity theory with respect to individuals' self-identification behavior. We report results from a laboratory experiment in which subjects choose their group membership, which is interpreted as decision to identify with the respective group. Inducing a trade-off between...

We empirically analyze why rating agencies disagree on countries' default risk. Specically, we explore the sovereign ratings of four agencies and their interaction. Our results indicate that the frequency of split ratings and their lopsidedness is not related to their home region. We...

In this paper, we explore the institutional investors' assessment of relative creditworthiness across selected country groups with a special focus on the impact of public debt on the perception of sovereign risk. Our results show that general government debt is among the most important...