In financial markets, professional traders leverage their trades because it allows to trade larger positions with less margin. Violating margin requirements, however, triggers a margin call and open positions are automatically covered until requirements are met again. What impact does margin...

In this paper, I discuss the difference between accommodated evidence (i.e. when evidence is known first and a hypothesis is the proposed to explain and fit the observations) and predicted evidence (i.e., when evidence verifies the prediction of a hypothesis formulated before observing the...

Two pairs of two participants each interact repeatedly in two structurally independent but informationally linked Prisoner's Dilemma games. Neither pair receives feedback about past choices by their own partner but is fully informed about the choices by the other pair. Considering this as a...

While envy has been studied extensively in adults, the question how envy develops during childhood has not received much attention. To address this gap, we report the results of an artefactual field experiment that investigates and compares the prevalence and development of destructive envy in...

South Africa's trade barriers are still relatively high compared to other emerging market economies, and its industrial policy still preferentially treats certain industries. Based on a static GTAP model, we estimate the economic impact of further trade liberalization on the South African...

We use the historical self-employment rate as an indicator of a regional culture of entrepreneurship and link this measure to economic growth in recent periods. The results indicate that German regions with a high level of entrepreneurship in the mid- 1920s have higher start-up rates about 80...

This paper analysis the possible demand for nature conservation within the Bavarian population. Drawing on the approach of revealed preferences and the mechanism of 'vote with their feet' of Tiebout (1956) migration patterns in Bavarian counties are examined in more detail in order to assess the...

Willingness to take risk depends on whether the risk affects others as well as oneself and on how the risk affects one's position vis-`a-vis others. Taking a bet can improve one's position relative to others or threaten it. We present an experiment that explores individual attitudes to lotteries...

The paper targets the relationship between growth of cooperation and later growth of innovation at the regional level. Patent data for German regions and eleven subsequent years is used to identify collaborative activity as well as the innovative output in each region. The results confirm to...

We provide a framework to decompose preferences into a notion of distributive justice and a selfishness part and to recover individual notions of distributive justice from data collected in appropriately designed experiments. "Dictator games" with varying transfer rates used in Andreoni and...