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The Effect of Social Comparison on Debt Taking: Experimental Evidence

A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we disentangle two mechanisms by performing a lab experiment designed to study the effects of social image concerns and peer information on consumption choices financed through debt taking. We find that ...

Sin Taxes and Self-Control

According to theory, "sin taxes" are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control respond at least as much to the tax as consumers with high self-control. We investigate empirically if demand response to soft drink and fat tax variations in Denmark depends on consumers' self-control. We use a unique home-scan panel that includes a survey measure of self-control. When taxes increase, consumers ...

The 13th Berlin IO Day

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) and supported by the Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the heart...

Expectation Management of Policy Leaders: Evidence from COVID-19

This paper studies how the communication of political leaders affects the expectation formation of the public. Specifically, we examine the expectation management of the German government regarding COVID-19-related regulatory measures during the early phase of the pandemic. We elicit beliefs about the duration of these restrictions via a high-frequency survey of individuals, accompanied by an addi-tional ...

The Role of Physician-Patient Similarity in Diagnosis and Treatment Decisions: Evidence from Antibiotic Prescribing

Physicians in primary care provide initial diagnosis and treatment for a diverse set of patients. However, whereas patients are demographically and socio-economically heterogeneous, physicians typically come from affluent and highly-educated backgrounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between physicians and the community they serve. I investigate the role of patient-physician similarity...

Ignorance, Intention and Stochastic Outcomes

In sequential interactions, both the agent’s intention and the outcome of his choice may influence the principal’s action. While outcomes are typically observable, intentions are more likely to be hidden, leaving potential wiggle room for the principal when deciding on a reciprocating action. We employ a controlled experiment to investigate how intentions and outcome affect the principal’s actions ...

Hours Risk and Wage Risk: Repercussions over the Life Cycle

We decompose earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks, we formulate a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply. For estimation, we use data on married American men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Permanent wage shocks explain ...

Financial Education is Effective and Efficient

Financial Education Affects Financial Knowledge and Downstream Behaviors

We study the rapidly growing literature on the causal effects of financial education programs in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with a total sample size of over 160,000 individuals. Many of these experiments are published in top economics and finance journals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment effects on financial knowledge ...

How Divestitures Affect Bargaining Power

This paper studies how bargaining power is affected by merger and divestiture policies. I provide a new empirical framework to compute bounds on brand-level bargaining weights using widely available sales data. Next, I exploit the variation in brand ownership caused by a large merger, cleared conditional on divestiture, in the U.S. deodorant market, to quantify the extent to which divestitures...