Our study puts special attention to the fact that R&D cooperations in the pharmaceutical industry are formed at different stages throughout the drug development process. We study if the timing to engage in R&D cooperations in the pharmaceutical industry has different impacts on the technology...

To what extent does a tax credit affect firms’ R&D activity? What are the mechanisms? This paper examines the effect of R&D tax credits on firms’ R&D expenditure by exploiting the variation across firms in the changes in the eligible tax credit rate between 2000 and 2003. Estimating the...

Using a large data set of European firms, this paper provides evidence that operations at multinational headquarters are significantly more profitable than operations at their foreign subsidiaries. The effect turns out to be robust and quantitatively large. Our findings suggest that the...

In downtown areas, what proportion of curbside should be allocated to parking? In contrast to most previous work on the economics of parking, this paper focuses on optimal curbside parking capacity in both first-best (where pricing is efficient) and second-best (where pricing is inefficient)...

We develop a theory of social planning with a concern for economic coercion, which we define as the difference between consumers’ actual utility, and the “counterfactual” utility they expect to obtain if they were able to set policy themselves. Reasons to limit economic coercion include...

A nudge is a non-coercive paternalistic intervention that attempts to improve choices by manipulating the framing of a decision problem. As any paternalism, it faces the difficulty of determining the appropriate welfare criterion. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in...

Public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life. Yet, empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive. We exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in Germany, which was contingent...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

We use payroll data on 1.2 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sector to identify incentive pay in the critical banking segments of treasury/capital market management and investment banking for 66 banks. We document an economically significant correlation of...

We determine workforce composition and wages in firms in the presence of productivity spill-overs between co-workers. In equilibrium, workers’ wages depend on the production structure of firms, own group size, and aggregate workforce composition in the firm. We estimate the wage effects of...