We test whether immigrants are more prone to support terror than natives because of lower opportunity costs, using the international World Values Survey data. We show that, in general, economically, politically and socially non-integrated persons are more likely to accept using violence for...

Recent empirical studies have revealed prejudice based on country of origin in the Swiss naturalization system before courts banned closed ballot voting in 2003. Although the switch to elected councils has ameliorated the situation for the discriminated applicant groups, little has been known...

This article considers legal uncertainty in competition law. Contrary to perceived wisdom, I show that the uncertainty itself might have positive welfare effects, if it is sufficiently small. Legal uncertainty functions as a screening device provided that the threshold of legality is uncertain....

We study deception choices and deception detection in a tax compliance experiment. We find large systematic differences in individual deception abilities. Tax payers are conscious about their own deception abilities. The empirical outcomes are in line with a theory suggesting that tax payers...

We consider a two-stage principal-agent model with limited liability in which a CEO is employed as agent to gather information about suitable merger targets and to manage the merged corporation in case of an acquisition. Our results show that the CEO systematically recommends targets with low...

We analyze the impact of partial public ownership (PPO) on managerial incentives. A novelty of the paper is that it explicitly considers competition in the product market. We find that PPO negatively affects managerial incentives when all firms are partially owned by the government. When...

When grades lose their informative value because the percentage of students receiving the best grade rises without any corresponding increase in ability, this is called grade inflation. Conventional wisdom says that such grade inflation is unavoidable since it is essentially costless to award...

What is the optimal size of expert committees? To address this question, I present a model of a committee of experts with career concerns. Each expert may observe an argument about the state of the world and is unsure about the argument s soundness. Experts may remain silent or compete for the...

We examine the herd behavior among equity funds in Germany based on a large sample of funds from 2000 to 2009. We show that a large portion of the detected herding can be explained by identical trading among funds of the same investment company. However, we also find statistically significant...