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...

We analyze the effects of personal characteristics of 4239 political candidates on their performance in local elections in Germany. Our results show that a candidate's occupation plays a decisive role. Occupational effects can be explained by (a) an occupation's public reputation and (b) public...

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 show that market discipline, defined as the extent to which frm specific risk characteristics are reflected 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...

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...

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...

This paper studies the role of uncertainty in the corporate cash hoarding puzzle. The baseline model is a stochastic neoclassical growth model featuring idiosyncratic and uninsurable technology shocks and a cash-in-advance constraint on new investments on the individual firm level. Individual...

We study the loss function of 15 European governments as implied by their budget balance forecasts. Results suggest that the shape of the loss function varies across countries. The loss function becomes more asymmetric as the forecast horizon increases and in advance of parliamentary election....

Following the critique of Pinkse & Slade (2010) and Gibbons & Overman (2012), we develop an instrument for the estimation of local price effects of cell phone base stations (CPBS) in an urban area. The instrument is derived from the spatial structure of the network and technical and regulatory...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...