Children with lower socioeconomic status (SES) tend to benefit more from early child care, but are substantially less likely to be enrolled. We study whether reducing behavioral barriers in the application process increases enrollment in child care for lower-SES children. In our RCT in Germany...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...

Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables....

I assert that air pollution from nitrogen oxides affects the productivity of employees in Mexican court hearings. This is the first article analyzing this connection and the first to disentangle work-breaks from the productivity of white-collar workers. I merge hourly pollution with granular...

This paper investigates the impact of peer observation on the consumption decisions of rural households in Thailand using a lab-in-the-field experiment. We find that those groups that observe each other show lower within group standard deviation in their decisions. Thus, we find evidence for...

This paper analyzes to what extent parental leave decisions of mothers with young children depend on the decisions made by their coworkers. The identification of peer effects, which are defined as indirect effects of the behavior of a social reference group on individual outcomes, bears various...

This paper investigates the impact of peer observation on consumption decisions of rural households in Thailand using a lab-in-the-field experiment. We find that observing groups show lower within group standard deviation. Thus, we provide evidence for conformity. Further, we find that...

A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we disentangle two mechanisms by performing a lab experiment designed to study the effects of...

While social relationships play an important role for individuals to cope with missing market institutions, they also limit individuals' range of trading partners. This paper aims at understanding the determinants of trust at various social distances when information asymmetries are present....

A fundamental question regarding the design of electricity markets is whether adding auctions to the continuous intraday trading is improving the performance of the market. To approach this question, we assess the experience with the implementation of the 3 pm local auction for quarters in...