How does online advertising affect consumer behaviour, product pricing and competition? To analyse this, I develop a theory of digital markets where an intermediary provides a platform for firms to advertise their product and where consumers need to engage in costly search if they want to learn about the product characteristics. First, I show that when prices are observable...
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...
Diese Arbeit untersucht den Einfluss verhaltensökonomischer Aspekte und Bildung für die finanzielle Entwicklung. Sie besteht aus vier Kapiteln, welche jeweils ein separates Forschungspapier darstellen. Die Kapitel decken folgende Themen ab: Determinanten einer impulsiven Kreditaufnahme, Hindernisse bei finanzieller Inklusion, die Auswirkungen von finanzieller Bildung und die finanziellen Folgen eines ...
This article investigates the impact of reorganization on productivity within public-sector firms addressing the owners' composition, the board-management relationship, and the management's decision to outsource activities. Considering a large panel of 2,325 German municipally owned utilities between 2003 and 2014, firm-level productivity is estimated based on a control function approach. Contrary ...
As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to understand whether the personality of entrepreneurs drives the first hiring in their firms. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we analyze to what extent personality traits influence the probability of becoming an employer. The results indicate that personality matters. ...
Following the 2015 refugee influx, recent studies have found that around one in four companies have hired refugees. A survey of 100 companies that hired refugees shows that hiring refugees can increase employee satisfaction, improve reputations, and positively affect corporate developments. At the same time, hiring refugees also poses challenges for employers. These include barriers in the hiring process, ...
Firms with superior productivity, labeled superstar firms, are argued to be the link between rising concentration and the fall of the aggregate labor share in the US. This analysis confirms that similar evidence is found within the European context: the market share and firm size increase, whereas the labor share decreases with productivity. One of the much discussed mechanisms behind this development ...