Recent decades have seen an intensification of international organizations' (IOs) attempts to justify their authority. The existing research suggests that IO representatives have scaled up self-legitimation to defend their organizations' legitimacy in light of public criticism. In contrast, this...

We investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in smaller units are advantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest for...

The persuasion rate is a key parameter for measuring the causal effect of a directional message on influencing the recipient's behavior. Its identification has relied on exogenous treatment or the availability of credible instruments, but the requirements are not always satisfied in...

Lowering carbon intensity in manufacturing is necessary to transform current production technologies. We test if local agents' preferences, revealed by vote shares for the Green party during local elections in Germany, relate to the carbon intensity of investments in production technologies. Our...

We study how connections to German federal parliamentarians affect firm dynamics by constructing a novel dataset linking politicians and election candidates to the universe of firms. To identify the causal effect of access to political power, we exploit (i) new appointments to the company...

The phenomenon of political populism and its financial determinants have proved elusive. We utilise the sudden and uneven change in credit conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented government credit guarantee programme in France to investigate whether liquidity support to...

In this paper we provide an empirical analysis of German casino locations. Due to the "mercantilistic background" of casinos, we assume that casinos are more likely to be found at borders and in tourist areas. Even though location decisions have been made in the past, we use cross-sectional data...

This paper considers pure strategy Nash equilibria of non-cooperative legislative bargaining models. In contrast to existing legislative bargaining models, we derive legislators behavior from stochastic utility maximization. This approach allows us to prove the existence of a stationary Pure...

Simple games in partition function form are used to model voting situations where a coalition being winning or losing might depend on the way players outside that coalition organize themselves. Such a game is called a plurality voting game if in every partition there is at least one winning...

The question of "Justice" still divides social research, moral philosophy, and public discourse. Three principles of distributive justice (allocation rules) occupy center stage in the debate: merit (equity, proportionality), need, and equality. Yet their relation remains diffuse, and current...