We use a credible regression discontinuity design to estimate causal education effects. Pupils in the Swiss education system had to pass a centrally organized exam that classified them into different levels of secondary school, and that ultimately determined their educational degree. A major...

Choice-based health insurance systems allow individuals to select a health plan that fits their needs. However, bounded rationality and limited attention may lead to sub-optimal insurance coverage and higher-than-expected out-of-pocket payments. In this paper, we study the impact of providing...

Inferring the implicit price of an environmental good hinges on ceteris paribus conditions that are often hard to justify. This paper uses an unexpected change in flight regulations as source of exogenous variation and identifies aircraft noise effects from price adjustments in the market for...

Background: The necessity to measure and reward "value for money" of new pharmaceuticals has become central in health policy debates, as much as the requirement to assess the "willingness to pay" for an additional, qualityadjusted life year (QALY). There is a clear need to understand the...

Prior research demonstrates a willingness to incur costs to punish norm violators. But, how strong are the motives underlying such acts? Will people rely on "excuses" to avoid acting on costly punishment intentions, as with other costly pro-social acts? In a laboratory experiment, we find that...

"Winner-Take-All"-markets, i.e. markets in which the relative and not the absolute performance is decisive, have gained in importance. Such markets have a tendency to provoke inefficiently many entries. We investigate the functioning of such markets with the help of experiments and show that...

Experimental games turned out to be remarkably productive tools for examining the nature of social preferences and social norms. This paper describes the methods and tools of experimental game theory and provides a selection of games that have been useful. We also discuss the role of...