We report the results of a field experiment evaluating the impact of financial literacy training on teenagers between 14 and 16 years in German high schools. After the training, treated teenagers exhibit a significant increase in both interest in financial matters and self-assessed knowledge...

We examine experimentally the effect of complexity on individual decision making. We focus on credit choices, as they have been widely criticized for their complexity in recent years. In a first study, we find that complexity in benefits leads to random mistakes, while complexity in costs leads...

Relational contracts have been shown to mitigate moral hazard in labor and credit markets. A central assumption in most theoretical and experimental studies is that, upon misbehaving, agents can be excluded from their current source of income and have to resort to less attractive outside...

Many initiatives worldwide aim at improving financial literacy through targeted education programs, yet there is little evidence regarding their effectiveness. We examine the impact of a short financial education program on teenagers in German high schools. Our findings reveal that the training...

This paper examines the effect of peers on individual risk taking. In the absence of informational motives, we investigate why social utility concerns may drive peer effects. We test for two main channels: utility from payoff differences and from conforming to the peer. We show experimentally...

External recruiting at least weakly improves the quality of the pool of applicants, but the incentive implications are less clear. Using a contest model, this paper investigates the pure incentive effects of external recruiting. Our results show that if workers are heterogeneous, the opening of...