We study the effect of entry on the price distribution in the German retail gasoline market. Exploiting more than 700 entries over five years in an event study design, we find that entry causes a persistent first-order stochastic shift in the price distribution. Prices at the top of the...

The use of payment cards, either debit or credit, is becoming more and more widespread in developed economies. Nevertheless, the use of cash remains significant. We hypothesize that the lack of card acceptance at the point of sale is a key reason why cash continues to play an important role. We...

In many industries, the number of firms evolves non-monotonically over time. A phase of rapid entry is followed by an industry shakeout: a large number of firms exit within a short period. We present a simple timing game of entry and exit with an exogenous technological process governing firm...

In the period following WW II. until the country accessed the European Union, cartels were legalized in Austria, upon registration with the Austrian Cartel Court. We obtained access to the registration data, and scanned them all towards a microeconomic analysis of contracting behavior between...

The discrete choice to adopt a financial innovation affects a household's exposure to inflation and transactions costs. We model this adoption decision as being subject to an unobserved cost. Estimating the cost requires a dynamic structural model, to which we apply a conditional choice...

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...