We find that firms are more likely to split their stock if their peer firms have recently done so. The effect is comparable to an increase of 40-50% in the share price. Splitting probability is also increasing in the announcement returns of peer splits. These results are consistent with social...

Social learning is the process of individuals learning by observing the actions of others. One odd aspect of the literature on social learning though is that, ironically, learning is not very social because in the real world, although people learn by observing the actions of others, they also...

We investigate how the selection process of a leader affects team performance with respect to social learning. We use a lab experiment in which an incentivized guessing task is repeated in a star network with the leader at the center. Leader selection is either based on competence, on...

This paper exploits detailed information on local political and socioeconomic networks and a reform of local fiscal equalization in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) to identify the role of learning in local tax rate interactions. Using this policy change in spatial lag IV regressions, we find that...

Agents in a network want to learn the true state of the world from their own signals and their neighbors' reports. Agents know only their local networks, consisting of their neighbors and the links among them. Every agent is Bayesian with the (possibly misspecified) prior belief that her local...

We investigate how the selection process of a leader affects team performance with respect to social learning. We use a lab experiment in which an incentivized guessing task is repeated in a star network with the leader at the center. Leader selection is either based on competence, on...