The EU is enthusiastically proposing climate saving policies that place Europe as the innovator in reducing emissions and increasing the share of renewable energy sources (RES). However, the application of suitable instruments appears to create problems with differences between the approaches...

In a public-good experiment with heterogeneous endowments, we investigate if and how the contribution level as well as the previously observed "fair-share" rule of equal contributions relative to one´s endowment (Hofmeyr et al., 2007; Keser et al., 2014) may be influenced by minimum-contribution...

In an overlapping generations economy, lenders fund risky investment projects of firms by drawing up loan contracts in the presence of an informational asymmetry. An optimal contract entails the issue of only debt, only equity, or a mix of the two. The equilibrium choice of contract depends on...

Certificate trading schemes have been discussed as a cost-efficient means of reducing land use in Germany by capping and reallocating permissions to conduct building projects. However, in contrast to the established cap & trade systems for emissions, reputation-seeking politicians would be in...

The anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic has been studied in numerous experimental settings and is increasingly drawn upon to explain systematically biased decisions in economic areas as diverse as auctions, real estate pricing, sports betting and forecasting. In these cases, anchors result from...

This paper analyzes the effect of different cooperation forms on innovation in small and medium enterprises in Belgium, Germany, Portugal and Spain using Community Innovation Survey data from 2008. We find that vertical cooperation and knowledge cooperation increases the probability to introduce...

This paper uses the quasi-experiment of Germany´s reunification to identify local tax mimicking by municipalities in Eastern-Germany. After reunification, East-German municipalities were allowed to independently set, for the first time in decades, local business and property tax rates. I...

We empirically study the role of different family policies in determining women´s labor market behavior in the countries of the European Union between 1997 and 2008. Women tend to assume more family duties than men and, consequently, often participate less in the labor market. At the same time,...

This paper studies the effect of two regulatory instruments - a price cap and a reference price system - a mandatory substitution rule, and the combination of both on generic competition in a Salop-type model with an off-patent brand-name drug and n differentiated generic versions. The price cap...

In this paper, we study the rational for an incumbent to launch a second brand when facing potential entry in a market with quality differentiated products and a fringe producer. Depending on market size, costs for a second brand and a potential entrant's setup cost the incumbent might use a...