We consider a situation of duopolistic competition in which one firm may (falsely) advertise high product quality. Consumers are heterogeneous. One group forms rational beliefs about quality, whereas some consumers are naive and fully trust any advertisement. We compare two scenarios in which...

Because verdicts are typically the more costly resolution of legal disputes, most governments are interested in high settlement rates. In this paper, we use a unique dataset of 860 case records from a German trial court to explore which factors have a significant impact on the decision to settle...

We study the optimal design of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms by a third-party mediator. ADR takes place before two litigants face each other in court. Litigation is a legal contest with players who are privately informed about the cost of collecting admissible evidence. Players...

We study the effects of financial sanctions on cross-border credit supply. Using a differences-in-differences approach to analyze eleven sanctions episodes between 2002 and 2015, we find that banks located in Germany reduce their positions in countries with sanctioned entities by 38%. The...

The paper examines the effect of international regulatory harmonization on cross-border labor migration. We analyze directives in the European Union (EU) that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. This regulatory harmonization should make it less costly for those who work in the...

We use hand-collected data from four German crowdinvesting portals to analyze what determines individual investment decisions in crowdinvesting. In contrast with the crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter, where the typical pattern of project support is U-shaped, we find crowdinvesting dynamics...

Legal European Company Forms to Realize Cross Border FOCJ - Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions Peter Friedrich Since several years Bruno Frey, Eichenberger and other authors launched the idea of a FOCJ "Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdiction". In Switzerland and USA school...

This paper investigates how family ownership, control and management affect firm investment performance. We use the identity of the CEO and the COB to establish under what management the firm is: founder, descendent or external management. The analysis shows that founder management has no effect...

Since innovative firms are often financially constrained, access to external funds is important for the expansion of innovative industries. This paper reports four important results. First, comparative advantage is shaped by factor endowments as well as fundamental determinants of corporate...