In many parts of the world, several decades of intensively applying Green Revolution technologies came at environmental costs, i.e. degraded water and soil quality as well as a loss of biodiversity. This has led to an increased interest in alternative farming systems such as organic farming,...

Business groups, which are ubiquitous in emerging market economies, balance the advantages of characteristics such as internal capital markets with the disadvantages such as inefficient internal distribution of resources and suppression of technological and other forms of innovativeness. In this...

We merge firm-level data on ownership linkages with administrative data on German workers to analyze how the position in a business group hierarchy affects workers' wages. To acknowledge that ownership linkages are not onedirectional, we propose an index of hierarchical distance to the ultimate...

It has been argued that Asia's remarkable economic achievements of the past 50 years build on institutional arrangements very different from the West, notably the central role of business groups (BGs). As Asian economies move from extensive to intensive growth, we enquire whether the business...

Using an open-ended contingent valuation survey, we analyze how (i) experience of a power outage due to one of the worst storms ever to hit Sweden and (ii) a cheap talk script affect respondents' WTP to avoid power outages. Experience significantly increases and a cheap talk script decreases the...

We study how the objective of the contributions affects the willingness to contribute to real-life public goods. We conducted three treatments of a fundraising experiment among religious Jewish students in which the contributions were assigned to finance sustainable supplies and the ongoing...

We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolistic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...

We exploit the Collective Clemency Bill passed by the Italian Parliament in July 2006 to evaluate the indirect effects of a policy that randomly commutes actual sentences to expected sentences for 40 percent of the Italian prison population. We estimate the direct and indirect impact of the...

We show that task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs. Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of...