This note elaborates on a potential misinterpretation of the convergence speeds that are associated with the beta-convergence effect. Practitioners and certain researchers often commit the common error of using the results from the logarithmic measure of the income gap to interpret the speed of...

We suggest to use car sale prices from internet advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly positively correlated with the official figures.

The prevalence of Internet-based sales was highlighted by the World Bank (Ferro, 2011) associating state-of-art technology with exporters. We use propensity score kernel matching with difference-in-differences to reveal export selection and evidence of ‘technology upgrading’ through higher...

This paper tests the hypothesis that, in the presence of credit constraints, higher wealth inequality affects negatively the growth gains from trade liberalisation. Variations in the growth rate of value added–decomposed in the growth rate of the number of establishments and the growth rate in...

We investigate the relationship between tournament prices and effort choices in the presence of favoritism. High tournament prizes can decrease agents’ effort supply when the choice of the winner is not perfectly objective but affected to some extent by personal preferences of an evaluator.

This paper analyzes in a relational contracting framework when a principal should fully delegate a task to a team of hired workers or only partially delegate the task and work herself in the team. It is shown that full delegation is more likely to be optimal under a less efficient monitoring...

We revisit job design with sequential tasks and outcome externalities from a different perspective, extending Schmitz (2013a). When two sequential tasks need to be performed by wealth-constrained agents, the principal can hire only one agent or two different agents. When there exists an outcome...

We show in a laboratory experiment that the same method of group induction carries different behavioral consequences. These heterogeneous treatment effects can be directly related to the quality of the relationship established between the subjects. Our results indicate the importance of...