When banks choose similar investment strategies, the financial system becomes vulnerable to common shocks. Banks decide about their investment strategy ex-ante based on a private belief about the state of the world and a social belief formed from observing the actions of peers. When the social...

Losing a partner is a life-changing experience. We draw on numerous datasets to examine differences between widowed and partnered older women and to provide a comprehensive picture of well-being in widowhood. Most importantly, our analysis accounts for time use in widowhood, an aspect which has...

"Closing borders is naive, the virus will come regardless" - this was the policy assumption that was repeatedly stated until mid-March by the WHO, the EU, as well as responsible authorities in Germany and other countries. Meanwhile, other states had started closing their borders to travellers...

Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, 2004-17) and time diaries from Poland (2013), the U.S. (2006-16), the U.K. (2014-15) and France (2009-10), we examine differences between widowed and partnered older women in well-being and its development in...

In markets with search frictions, consumers can acquire information about goods either through costly search or from friends via word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. How do sellers’ market power react to a very large increase in the number of consumers’ friends with whom they engage in WOM?...

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their “friends” and less information acquisition via active search. Free-riding also has an...

The availability of social media data is growing and represents a new data source for economic research. This paper presents a detailed study on the use of data from a careeroriented social networking platform for measuring employee flows and employer networks. The employment data are exported...

We analyze the impact of the Network Enforcement Act, the first regulation which aims at restraining hate speech on large social media platforms. Using a difference-in- differences framework, we measure the causal impact of the German law on the prevalence of hateful content on German Twitter....