We investigate the effect of market structure on market performance in the market for consumer electronics. This research is novel, because we exploit product life cycle information to build an instrumental variable for the number of firms in a market, a variable which hitherto had to be treated...

Cartels were legal to a large extent in Austria until the country’s EU Accession in 1995. We examine archival material on registered horizontal cartels to learn about their inner working. Applying content analysis to legally binding cartel contracts, we comprehensively document different...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between females among the first hires of start-up companies and business success. Our results show that firms with female first hires have a higher share of female workers at the end of the first year after entry. Further, we find that firms with...

According to Becker's (1957) famous theory on discrimination, entrepreneurs with a strong prejudice against female workers forgo profits by submitting to their tastes. In a com- petitive market their firms lack efficiency and are therefore forced to leave. We present new empirical evidence for...

This paper demonstrates how firm information can be extracted from administrative social security records. We use the Austrian Social Security Database (ASSD) and derive firms from employer identifiers in the universe of private sector workers. To correctly pin down entry end exits we use a...