Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

In making key decisions for the future phases of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), policy makers need to fully understand the competitiveness implications of these decisions on industrial sectors. In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of cost pass-through ability of...

In dieser Studie werden ausgewählte makroökonomische Determinanten der Anzahl der Selbständigen in fünfzehn Ländern Europas untersucht. Datenbasis sind die Arbeitskräfteerhebungen der Europäischen Union für die Jahre 1991 ? 2003. Ausgangspunkt der Studie ist der Rückgang der Anzahl der...

In dem vorliegenden Artikel werden ausgewählte theoretische und empirische Aspekte des Zusammenhangs zwischen Existenzgründungen, staatlichem Handeln und Beschäftigung diskutiert. Dabei wird die Frage, ob Existenzgründungen zusätzliche Beschäftigung schaffen überwiegend aus einer...

Economic theory suggests that performance pay may serve as an effective screening device to attract productive agents. The existing evidence on the self-selection of agents is largely limited to job tasks where performance is driven by routine, well-defined procedures. This study presents...

Using experimental data of children and their mothers, this paper explores the intergenerational relationship of impatience. The child's impatience stems from a delay of gratification experiment. Mother's impatience has been assessed by a choice task where the mothers faced trade-offs between a...

In this paper, we investigate both short- and long-term impacts of financial stimuli on public goods provision when contributions are tied to individual harm-related behavior. We conduct a large-scaled field experiment to examine voluntary contributions to a carbon offsetting program during the...

This paper deals with the effect of (i) damage experience from extreme weather events and (ii) expectations concerning future climate change on subjective wellbeing (SWB). We use data of a large representative survey amongst German households. The effect of experienced weather events on SWB of...

When contributing content on large online platforms, producers of user-generated content have to decide where to contribute. On a complex and dynamic platform like Wikipedia, this decision is expected to depend on the way the content is organized. We analyse whether the hyperlinks on Wikipedia...

We investigate the incentives of manufacturers to use resale price maintenance (RPM) when selling products through common retailers. In our model retailers provide product specific pre-sales services. If the competitive retail margins are low, each manufacturer fixes a minimum price to induce...