We study an important mechanism underlying employee referrals into informal low skilled jobs in developing countries. Employers can exploit social preferences between employee referees and potential workers to improve discipline. The profitability of using referrals increases with referee stakes...

We study an important mechanism underlying employee referrals into informal low skilled jobs in developing countries. Employers can exploit social preferences between employee referees and potential workers to improve discipline. The profitability of using referrals increases with referee stakes...

Economic preferences – like time, risk and social preferences – have been shown to be very influential for real-life outcomes, such as educational achievements, labor market outcomes, or health status. We contribute to the recent literature that has examined how and when economic preferences...

As a unified discipline, econometrics is still relatively young and has been transforming and expanding very rapidly over the past few decades. Major advances have taken place in the analysis of cross sectional data by means of semi-parametric and non-parametric techniques. Heterogeneity of...

The empirical literature on city size distributions has mainly focused on the USA. The first major contribution of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the evolution and structure of the West-German city size distribution. Using a unique annual data set that covers most of the 20th...

We reassess the driving forces behind the recent decline of corporate tax rates in Europe. Using data for up to 32 countries from 1983 to 2006, we analyze the role of economic and financial openness as well as tax competition while allowing for dynamic adjustment to shocks and period-specific as...

Traditional approaches to structural vector autoregressions can be viewed as special cases of Bayesian inference arising from very strong prior beliefs. These methods can be generalized with a less restrictive formulation that incorporates uncertainty about the identifying assumptions...