We present a model of opinion formation where individuals repeatedly engage in discussion and update their opinion in a social network similarly to the DeGroot model. Abstracting from the standard assumption that individuals always report their opinion truthfully, agents in our model may state...

With the help of lab experiments we study the impact of discharging insolvent debtors of their residual debt. We investigate the impact of different participation rules and the impact of different types of lenders. We find that higher participation rates encourage risk taking behaviour of...

There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also diff er along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of almost 8,000 American cities, we fi nd that older cities in the US...

Dismissal protection has experienced many statutory changes in Germany in the past decades. This paper estimates the effects of dismissal protection on the hazard of leaving the establishment using as identification that workers employed before the legal amendment maintained their previous...

This paper indicates that the extent of collective bargaining coverage in an industry may depend on the differences in firms productivity levels within the industry. Less pronounced differences in productivity levels make it easier to design collective wage contracts that are accepted by a wider...

As reliance on excessively short-term wholesale funding has been one of the major causes for the 2007-2009 financial crisis, recent advances in global liquidity regulation try to curb the excessive reliance on short-term wholesale funding without being clear on how such an approach will affect...

Due to their well-known indeterminacies, factor models require identifying assumptions to guarantee unique parameter estimates. For Bayesian estimation, these identifying assumptions are usually implemented by imposing constraints on certain model parameters. This strategy, however, may result...

In this paper we explore the degree of anchoring of inflation expectations of consumers by analysing the comovement in short- and long-run expectations. If inflation expectations are firmly anchored, a transitory shock should influence the short-run inflation expectations but not effect long-run...

We analyze the effect of workforce composition by birthplace on workers' wages. In our model, each worker's productivity may depend on whether co-workers are of the same or of a different birthplace. Wages depend both on the relative size of workers' groups as well as on the production structure...

In this paper we use the frequency domain Granger causality test of Breitung/Candelon (2006) to analyse short and long-run causality between energy prices and prices of food commodities. We find that the oil price Granger causes all the considered food prices. However, when controlling for...