We examine effects of government-imposed employment targets on firm behavior. Theoretically, such policies create “polarization,“ causing low-productivity firms to exit the market while others temporarily distort their employment upward. Dynamically, firms are incentivized to improve...

This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to employment targets, with penalties for non-compliance. Using a dynamic model, we...

Tracking online user behavior is essential for targeted advertising and is at the heart of the business model of major online platforms. We analyze tracker-specific web browsing data to show how the prediction quality of consumer profiles varies with data size and scope. We find decreasing...

We provide an evaluation of the impact of German public subsidy schemes in municipalities of Bavaria and Lower Saxony aimed at supporting the deployment of basic broadband infrastructure in rural Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission and may only be...

We study the interaction of customer capital and productivity through brand reallocation across firms. We develop a firm dynamics model with brands as transferable customer capital, heterogeneous firm productivity, and variable markups. We study the matching process between transferable brand...

Electronic payment instruments have the potential to spur the transparency of business transactions and thereby reduce information frictions. We design a field experiment to understand whether e-payments facilitate the financial inclusion of SMEs in developing world and to study adoption...

What determines the adoption of electronic-payment instruments? Do these instruments impact business outcomes, in particular access to finance? To shed light on these questions, we conducted a Randomized-Controlled-Trial with Kenyan SMEs. Our experiment released barriers to adopt a novel payment...

This paper provides a first estimate of the potential greenhouse gas mitigation from the intra-sector reallocation of economic activity by the European manufacturing industry away from carbon-inefficient - or "brown zombie" - firms to more carbon-efficient firms. Using techniques from the...

Knowledge creation is the foundation for indigenous innovation in manufacturing enterprises; however, the effects of digital transformation on knowledge creation are still not well understood. Nonaka put forward the model of knowledge creation, which includes four processes: socialization,...