In a meta-regression analysis of 115 microeconometric impact evaluation studies we find that financial education significantly impacts financial behavior, and to an even larger extent financial literacy. These results also hold for the subsample of RCTs. However, intervention impacts are highly...

In the absence of closed-shops and discriminatory wage policies, union membership can be explained by the existence of social norms. We develop a theoretical frame-work which nests various social custom models. Using micro data for Germany and Great Britain, we find evidence for social custom...

We link life-satisfaction data to inequality of the pre-government income distribution at the regional level, to estimate the degree of inequality aversion. In addition, we investigate whether a reduction in inequality by the state increases individual well-being. We find that Germans are...

Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of public referenda. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiatives. Based on municipality-level data for Germany, we make use of legislative changes at specific...

Foundational to the discipline of management is the idea that organizational decisions are a function of expected outcomes; hence, the customary empirical approach to employ multivariate techniques that regress performance outcome variables on discrete measures of organizational choices (e.g.,...

This study analyzes the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on health. We exploit a sizable cohort-specific pension reform for women using two complementary empirical approaches - a Regression Discontinuity Design and a Difference-in- Differences approach. The analysis is based on...

Part-time work has vastly expanded in most OECD labor markets during the last decades. At the same time, full- and part-time wages have grown increasingly apart, leading to a substantial raw part-time wage penalty. Using quantile regression methods, this paper analyses the female part-time wage...