We analyze clients’ contract choices in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for standard cases such as labor disputes for individuals and collecting debts for businesses. In the auctions, lawyers can submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer, including an hourly rate, a fixed fee, and a ‘mixed fee’: a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly rate for any additional hours should the case take ...
It is striking that economists in particular firmly believe in the benefits of rule-binding, even though this belief runs counter to the standard assumption of economic theory that we humans are self-interested and therefore extremely resourceful when it comes to circumventing inconvenient government regulations, e.g. taxes. In Public Choice Theory, politicians are even assumed to have nothing but ...
We study a merger between two Dutch supermarket chains to assess its effect on the depth as well as composition of assortment. We adopt a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits local variation in pre-merger competitive conditions and thus in the merger outcomes. To define our control group, we account for selection on observables through a matching procedure. We observe that, after the merger, ...
We study how budget constraints affect effort provision in sequential elimination tournaments. Our main result is that the introduction of budget constraints has two opposing effects on the initial effort of the unconstrained contestants, and leads to a non-monotonicity of this effort. This implies that if the budget asymmetry is not too large, total first-stage effort from unconstrained contestants ...
Innovation has recently come to the attention of Antitrust Authorities, even though the effect of mergers on innovation is still hotly debated. I study how the activity of Antitrust Authorities impacts future innovation of merging firms. Exploiting a change in notification rules I build an event study comparing mergers notified to the authorities with non-notified ones. I develop a new methodology...
We develop and implement a new measure for inequality aversion: two peers are endowed with identical binary lotteries and the only choice they make is whether they want to play out the lotteries independently or with perfect positive correlation (coupling). Coupling has the core reason to prevent outcome inequality. We implement the method in a survey in rural Thailand as well as in a supplemental ...
Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and ...
Die überarbeitete Sustainable-Finance-Strategie der EU bestätigt die wichtige Rolle der Finanzbranche für die Nachhaltigkeitstransition der Wirtschaft, konkretisiert sie jedoch nicht ausreichend. Viele der Maßnahmen sind begrüßenswert, oft mangelt es jedoch an Dringlichkeit und Dynamik. Die Strategie sollte stärker in das gesamtwirtschaftliche regulatorische Umfeld eingeordnet werden, um das Zusammenwirken ...