We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical German data. Firms' forecasts improve with age. We exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms in the East are treated with ignorance about the distribution...

Do firms learn to forecast future business conditions after major structural changes to the economy? How long does it take? We exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment, where firms in the East are treated with ignorance about the distribution of market states, to test a Bayesian...

We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical data from the Ifo Institute's Business Climate Survey. We find that firms' forecasts improve as they age. We also exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms...

Today, scientific knowledge is predominantly disseminated in English. We show that global universities' research performance declines as the differences of their local language from English increase. This effect is robust to controls for proportion of international staff and faculty-to-student...

Educational tracking seeks to group students by unobserved ability using measures of observable acquired skills. In a model where individuals have differential skills prior to beginning formal education due to differences in early childhood development (e.g. linguistic, cultural, or nutritional...

Global universities are switching their language of instruction to English to strengthen international rankings and research power. This paper quantifies the benefits of switching to English on university research performance and faculty recruiting. Using the two-way fixed effects (TWFE)...

Does privatisation increase firm productivity because the private owner's objective is different, or because she is better able to control management? Is privatisation sufficient to improve productivity, or is it only effective in combination with competition? We answer these questions for Great...

We analyze the management input from the perspective of a shadow cost minimizing firm. With the help of Bloom and Van Reenen (2007)'s management measure we estimate management's shadow price, dual Morishima elasticities of substitution, and relative price efficiencies vis-à-vis labor...

In their seminal paper Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) showed that management practices correlate with firm performance. In many instances empirical researchers do not observe management practices. They usually resort to performance estimates as proxies for management practices. We ask whether two...