To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

A lack of transparency about policy performance can pose a major obstacle to welfare-enhancing policy competition across jurisdictions. In parallel surveys with German citizens and state parliamentarians, we document that both groups misperceive the performance of their state's education system....

Advertisements provide consumers with knowledge about private products, whereas political information is required to provide voters with knowledge of public issues. Modern information technologies and globalization are increasing the exposure of individuals to information. Goods advertising is...

For many people "solidarity" has become a meaningless word used in slogans - too often used without leading to any economic consequences. We show in this paper conditions under which solidarity can be a powerful instrument. In a solidary action, an individual in a group contributes to a series...

Randomized experiments are often viewed as the "gold standard" of scientific evidence but people's scepticism towards experiments has compromised their viability in the past. We study preferences for experimental policy evaluations in a representative survey in Germany (N1,900). We find that a...

Much of today's software relies on programming code shared openly online. Yet, it is unclear why volunteer developers contribute to open-source software (OSS), a public good. We study OSS contributions of some 22,900 developers worldwide on the largest online code repository platform, GitHub,...

This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the interaction of emigration of highly skilled labor, an economy`s income gap to potential host economies of expatriates, and optimal public infrastructure investment. In a model with endogenous education and R&D investment decisions we show...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. Projects may differ in their value for the designer, and their cost is private information. In this allocation problem, the quantity of procured projects is endogenously determined...

We show how sanctioning is more effective in increasing cooperation between groups than within groups. We study this using a trust game among ethnically diverse subjects in Afghanistan. In the experiment, we manipulate i) sanctioning and ii) ethnic identity. We find that sanctioning increases...