Topic Firms

State-owned Firms and Payout Policy - Evidence from German Municipal Firms

This study investigates the payout policy of state-owned municipal firms. Based on insights from agency theory we derive an empirically testable model based on Lintner's corporate dividend policy model accounting for the characteristics of state-owned firms in terms of corporate governance and ownership structure. Exploiting a large and new panel dataset on German firms from the years 2003 to 20...

Choosing between Explicit Cartel Formation and Tacit Collusion – An Experiment

Abstract: Antitrust authorities try to detect and sanction existing cartels and hinder the formation of new ones. Firms nevertheless try to collude while avoiding sanctions, for example by colluding tacitly instead of explicitly forming a cartel. In this paper, we focus on differences in the communication of firms that either form an explicit cartel or try to collude tacitly. The latter may still...

Performance, Competition and Corporate Social Responsibility in Organisations

Abstract: We examine experimentally the impact of corporate social responsibility techniques on individuals’ performance and willingness to compete. Our baseline treatment adopts the Niederle-Vesterlund (2007) paradigm whereby individuals perform a task under piece-rate and tournament incentives, followed by an opportunity to determine which of the two payment schemes they prefer. In our...

Drug Firms’ payments and physician prescribing behavior in the US

Consumer Rating Dynamics

(joint with André Stenzel and Peter Schmidt) We consider dynamic price-setting in the presence of rating systems and asymmetric information about product quality. We provide a framework in which the price charged determines the characteristics of purchasing consumers. The price has two effects on future ratings: (i) a direct price effect on reviews, and (ii) an indirect selection effect...

What Makes an Employer?

As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), we analyze what role individual characteristics of entrepreneurs play in sustainable job creation. ...

“I Want to, But I Also Need to”: Start-Ups Resulting from Opportunity and Necessity

When unemployed persons start businesses, they are often characterized as necessity entrepreneurs because push motives, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. Based on a panel data set of more than 2600 start-ups by unemployed persons, we show that not only push but also pull motives can be observed among previously unemployed business founders. Moreover, a third type of entrepreneur ...

What Makes an Employer?

As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), we analyze what role individual characteristics of entrepreneurs play in sustainable job creation. ...

What Makes an Employer?

As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP), we analyze what role individual characteristics of entrepreneurs play in sustainable job creation. ...

Italy Must Foster High Growth Industries

Italy has yet to recover from the economic consequences of the financial and sovereign debt crisis that began more than a decade ago. In addition to losing 1.4 million jobs across the manufacturing and construction sectors, new industries driving growth across the EU, such as knowledge-intensive services, are instead stagnating in Italy. Previous structural reforms focused on deregulating the labor ...