Given recent history it may be necessary to recall that the so-called Great Recession we have been witnessing for more than five years now was, first and foremost, a crisis of financial markets. One reason for rising debt levels at the outset of the crisis have been massive government...

In January 2009, the law on the reform of the inheritance tax and valuation law (German) came into force. As a result, the valuation of shares in non-listed corporations was fundamentally changed. The paper compares and analyzes different enterprise values through the application of different...

Changes in transportation are closely linked to the economic and logistical characteristics of the production system. The aim of this paper is, on the basis of data on the economic context and surveys conducted in France (the 1988 Shipper survey and the 2004 ECHO survey) and in Germany (the 2005...

Field data on the strategic use of deficits to limit the budgetary scope of future governments are inconclusive about the effects of political polarization or a government's re-election probability on fiscal policy. Therefore, we designed a controlled experiment to examine the strategic use of...

We test for the influence of government strength and dispersion of power among the parties of coalition governments on the size of annual debt accumulation through budget deficits in OECD-countries from 1970 to 1999. Government strength and power dispersion in coalition governments are measured...

Informational asymmetries abound in economic decision making and often provide an incentive for deception through telling a lie or misrepresenting information. In this paper I use a cheap-talk sender-receiver experiment to show that telling the truth should be classified as deception too if the...

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information between sellers and consumers that may give rise to inefficiencies, such as under- and overtreatment or market break-down. We study in a large experiment with 936 participants the determinants for efficiency in credence goods...

In hierarchical organizations the role of a team leader often requires making decisions which do not necessarily coincide with the majority opinion of the team. However, these decisions are final and binding for all team members. We study experimentally why, and under which conditions, leaders...

We show that the level of trust and reciprocity in an intercultural trust game experiment between Austrian and Japanese subjects differs from the results of an intracultural experiment run in the respective countries among compatriots. Austrian subjects show significantly higher levels of trust...

The need for efficient coordination is ubiquitous in organizations and industries. The literature on the determinants of efficient coordination has focused on individual decision-making so far. In reality, however, teams often have to coordinate with other teams. We present an experiment with...