Governments provide public information about economic conditions to reduce information imperfections and facilitate efficient allocation of resources. Do households in developing countries rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public...

This paper provides a discussion of stamp duty and its effects. This is followed by an empirical study using changes in the rate of stamp duty in the UK as natural experiments. Because shares will be affected differently depending on how frequently they are traded, we can employ a...

The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for...

In 1999, in Germany, the statutory sick pay level was increased from 80 to 100 percent of foregone earnings for sicknessepisodes of up to six weeks. We show that this reform has led to an increase in average absence days of about 10 percent or one additional day per employee, per year. The...

Several German states recently introduced tuition fees for university education. We investigate whether these tuition fees influence the mobility of university applicants. Based on administrative data of applicants for medical schools in Germany, we estimate the effect of tuition fees on the...

The New Economic Geography predicts a positive effect of market access on wages, as represented by the wage equation. Several studies provide empirical evidence in favor of the wage equation. However, a key problem is the endogeneity of market access: it is challenging to identify the causal...

The emergence of Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) business models as a successful alternative to conventional uniform pricing brings up new questions related to the task of pricing. We investigate the eect of a reduction of privacy on consumers' purchase decisions (whether to buy, and if so how much to...

More than ten years ago, to increase mothers’ participation in the labour market and to enhance child development, the province of Québec implemented a $5 per day universal childcare policy. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the costs and benefits of the program over that period....

Sampling poses an interesting problem in markets with experience goods. Free samples reveal product quality and help consumers to make informed purchase decisions (promotional effect). However, sampling may also induce consumers to substitute purchases with free consumption (displacement...

This paper analyzes the impact of diabetes awareness on labor income using data from a natural experiment in China. We find that diabetes in general leads to a 16.3% decrease in annual income after people being diagnosed, and the adverse impact is heterogeneous across different populations.