This paper analyzes the relationships between the degree of decentralization of public policy and the emergence of horizontal strategic interactions. We analyze the structural funds allocation process in determining how the structure of governance of cohesion policy a ects the development of...

Blockchain technology is firmly established in the public awareness as a revolutionary new technology underpinning cryptocurrency. However, its potential applications can be found across sectors and industries in providing a novel way of producing coordination necessary to transact online,...

A loss-averse buyer and seller face an uncertain environment. Should they write a long-term contract or wait until the state of the world is realized? I show that simple long-term contracts perform better than insinuated in Herweg and Schmidt (2015), even though loss aversion makes renegotiation...

We study a credence goods problem - that is, a moral hazard problem with non-contractible outcome - where altruistic experts (the agents) care both about their income and the utility of consumers (the principals). Experts' preferences over income and their consumers' utility are convex, such...

A loss averse buyer and seller face an uncertain environment. Should they write a long-term contract or wait until the state of the world has realized? I show that simple long-term contracts perform better than insinuated in Herweg and Schmidt (2015), even though loss aversion makes...

We demonstrate that the co-existence of different motives for liquidity preferences profoundly affects the efficiency of financial intermediation. Liquidity preferences arise because consumers wish to take precautions against sudden and unforeseen expenditure needs, and because investors want to...

What is the role of heterogenous house-price expectations for boom-bust cycles in the housing market? We exploit a unique Dutch panel data set on households' house price expectations and their consumption, savings and housing choices for the period 2003-2016. This period was characterized by a...

Household over-indebtedness has increased worldwide. This study investigates one possible reason for this increase: biased income expectations. Thereby, we refer to the "permanent income hypothesis", which predicts that individuals borrow more today if they expect a higher income in the future....

This research note empirically investigates whether cash can prevent consumers from making needless purchases in unexpected shopping situations. Cash can have a disciplinary effect on short-term consumption because it imposes a strong temporary budget constraint and also reinforces the pain of...

Exploiting the natural experiment of the German reunification, we examine how consumers adapt to a new environment in their macroeconomic forecasting. We document that East Germans expect higher inflation and make larger forecast errors than West Germans even decades after reunification....