We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a...

Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the causal effects of music training on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how long-term music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality,...

National life satisfaction is an important way to measure societal well-being and since 2011 has been used to judge the effectiveness of government policy across the world. However, there is a paucity of historical data making limiting long-run comparisons with other data. We construct a new...

This paper analyzes whether workplace employee representation (ER) affects the design of firm hierarchies. We rationalize the role of ER within a knowledge-based model of hierarchies, where the firm's choice of hierarchical layers depends on the trade-off between communication and knowledge...

This study investigates the dose-response effects of making music on youth development. Identification is based on the conditional independence assumption and estimation is implemented using a recent double machine learning estimator. The study proposes solutions to two highly practically...

Many start-ups chose to compete with incumbent firms using one of two generic strategies: cost leadership or differentiation. Our study demonstrates how this choice depends on whether the startup was founded out of necessity. Our results, based on a representative data set of 4,568 German...

In this study, we address the relationship between performance appraisal and competitive strategy, as well as the impact of this relationship on firm performance. The results indicate that the adoption of developmental performance appraisal and the use of administrative performance appraisal are...

Using a unique longitudinal representative survey of both manufacturing and non-manufacturing businesses in the United States during the 1990's, I examine the incidence and intensity of organizational innovation and the factors associated with investments in organizational innovation. Past...

We study the economics of employment relationships through theoretical and empirical analysis of an unusual set of firms, large law firms. Our point of departure is the "property rights" approach that emphasizes the centrality of ownership's legal rights to control important, non-human assets of...