We analyse data from a field setting in which students participate in a dynamic group contest with feedback. We combine this information with a laboratory measure of competitiveness. We ?nd that competitive groups perform worse overall. In addition, we find that participants react to...

We study how students’ social networks emerge by documenting systematic patterns in the process of friendship formation of incoming students; these students all start out in a new environment and thus jointly create a new social network. As a specific novelty, we consider cooperativeness, time...

We show that market discipline, defined as the extent to which firm specific risk characteristics are re ected in market prices, eroded during the recent financial crisis in 2008. We design a novel test of changes in market discipline based on the relation between firm specific risk...

This paper empirically analyzes how performance feedback and information on heterogeneity affect behavior in dynamic contests, using data on two-player-contests from a smartphone/tablet application called ``Wordblitz for Friends''. We find that players increase output as underdogs and decrease...

This paper tests social identity theory with respect to individuals' self-identification behavior. We report results from a laboratory experiment in which subjects choose their group membership, which is interpreted as decision to identify with the respective group. Inducing a trade-off between...

The analysis of distributions is central to search and matching models. Wage distributions are a central concern but distributions of productivities, fi?rm types, human capital, entitlement to unemployment benefi?ts and wealth become increasingly important. We present a method - the...

FDI is generally attributed to have positive impact for developing countries. In contrast, this paper shows that foreign capital inflows may cause an economy to be stuck in a middle-income trap. Introducing a simple capital market imperfection into a standard neoclassical (open-economy) model of...

The minimum tour duration problem (MTDP) is the variant of the traveling salesman problem with time windows, which consists of finding a time window-feasible Hamiltonian path minimizing the tour duration. We present a new effective dynamic programming (DP)-based approach for the MTDP. When...

We study the impact of capital regulation on the quality of the banking sector in the presence of heterogeneous banks. Closely related to Morrison and White (2005), we provide a general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous individuals that differ in their ability of successfully completing a...

To which extent does an increase in operating effectiveness of public employment agencies on the one hand and a reduction of unemployment benefits on the other reduce unemployment? Using the recent labour market reform in Germany as background we find that the role of unemployment benefit...