Interest in the Latin American emerging markets (LAEM) has increased considerably in recent years. It is often claimed that they have to pay a price for being too different from developed markets, i.e. for having weak institutions, failed macroeconomic programs, political instability, poor...

The emphasis of this book is on understanding special characteristics of the financial systems of emerging markets, where the existence of market imperfections such as asymmetric information, adverse selection and moral hazard can cause financial market failures. Considering the Thai stock...

Bei der Einführung innovativer Kommunikationsdienste stehen Anbieter vor der Aufgabe, einen Markt zu schaffen, denn Nachfrager sind erst dann bereit, in die Kommunikationstechnologie zu investieren, wenn eine zufrieden stellende Teilnehmerzahl erreicht wird. Der Aufbau positiver Erwartungen...

A large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands changed minimum school size rules underlying public funding. The supply of schools decreased by 15 percent, but this varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils'...

We present evidence from an experiment in which groups select a leader to compete against the leaders of other groups in a real-effort task that they have all performed in the past. We find that women are selected much less often as leaders than is suggested by their individual past performance....

Recent empirical contributions in labor economics suggest that individual firms face upward sloping labor supplies. We rationalize this by assuming that idiosyncratic non-pecuniary conditions interact with money wages in workers' decisions to work for specific firms. Likewise, firms supply...

German universities are regarded as being under-financed, inefficient, and performing below average if compared to universities in other European countries and the US. Starting in the 1990s, several German federal states implemented reforms to improve this situation. An important part of these...

Previous research shows that firms shroud high add-on prices in competitive markets with naive consumers leading to inefficiency. We analyze the effects of regulatory intervention via educating naive consumers on equilibrium prices and welfare. Our model allows firms to shroud, unshroud, or...