Micro- and small firms lack access to external finance and the labour market so that they are vulnerable to family hardships experienced by the owners such as deaths or sickness of family members. The literature is thin on how these firms cope with family hardships, in particular on whether...

We examine the effects of the three-point rule in individual sports. We consider chess in which most tournaments use the standard rule while some tournaments use the Bilbao rule, which is identical to the three-point rule in soccer: We observe the same pairs of chess players playing under both...

We examine whether the three-point rule—the increase in rewards for a win from two- to three points that FIFA adopted in 1995—makes Bundesliga games become more exciting. Using regression discontinuity design as the empirical strategy, we do not find evidence that the three-point rule makes...