We analyze product market competition between firm owners where the risk-neutral workers decide on their efforts and, thereby, on the output levels. Various worker compensation schemes are compared: a piece-rate compensation scheme as a benchmark when workers’ output performance is verifiable,...

We assess financial theory-based and machine learning-implied measurements of stock risk premia by comparing the quality of their return forecasts. In the low signal-to-noise environment of a one month horizon, we find that it is preferable to rely on a theory-based approach instead of engaging...

We study oligopolistic competition in product markets where the firms’ quantity decisions are delegated to managers. Some firms are commonly owned by shareholders such as index funds whereas the other firms are owned by independent shareholders. Under such an asymmetric ownership structure,...

In the past years, work time in many industries has become increasingly flexible opening up a new channel for intertemporal substitution. To study this, we set up a two-period model with wage uncertainty. This extends the standard saving model by allowing a worker to allocate a fixed time budget...

There is a presumption that when an individual’s comparison of his income with the incomes of others in his comparison group yields an unfavorable outcome, the individual is dismayed and experiences stress that impinges negatively on his health. In a recent study, Hounkpatin et al. (2016)...

We study the causal effect of the possibility to vote on foreigners propensity to naturalize, a key indicator of successful integration. Based on Swedish administrative data and an institutional setting producing a quasi-random assignment of the eligibility to vote, we find that the overall...

We analyze the impact of (over-)confidence on gender differences in expected starting salaries using elicited beliefs of prospective university students in Germany. According to our results, female students have lower wage expectations and are less overconfident than their male counterparts....

We propose forecast encompassing tests for the Expected Shortfall (ES) jointly with the Value at Risk (VaR) based on flexible link (or combination) functions. Our setup allows testing encompassing for convex forecast combinations and for link functions which preclude crossings of the combined...

Rational respondents to economic surveys may report as a point forecast any measure of the central tendency of their (possibly latent) predictive distribution, for example the mean, median, mode, or any convex combination thereof. We propose tests of forecast rationality when the measure of...

We disentangle the effects of monetary policy announcements on real economic variables into an interest rate shock component and a central bank information shock component. We identify both components using changes in interest rate futures and in exchange rates around monetary policy...