We study the impact of platform choice (iOS vs Android) for firms that build apps for smart phones. We merge app data from Sensor Tower® with financial performance data from Crunchbase®. We find that apps that begin on Android have greater average downloads per month. However, apps with the...

In recent years, several countries have introduced non-monetary performance incentives for health care providers to improve the quality of medical care. Evidence on the effect of non-monetary feedback incentives, predominantly in the form of public quality reporting, on the quality of medical...

Consumption patterns can be indicative of how a consumer wants to be perceived by others. In this paper, I study markets where consumers are heterogeneous with respect to both their concerns for the quality of goods and the image associated with buying them. Consumers with a taste for quality...

Crowdfunding, a novel form of financing, has seen massive growth over the last few years. Under crowdfunding, a large number of small households offers small loans to a firm. But if some threshold is missed, the firm cannot draw the loans. We construct a model to argue that this mechanism can be...

This paper provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of “creditor rights” and “information sharing” throughout over 1.8 million private firms in Europe. We show that many of the outcomes associated with greater levels of creditor rights can be obtained with higher...

To mitigate information asymmetry problems with respect to the thermal quality of houses, many countries have introduced Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs). Using big data on real estate advertisements that cover large parts of the German housing market, this paper empirically investigates...

We present results from a market experiment where firms with identical products can choose not only their price but also the format of their product. Products with different formats are difficult to compare but products with the same format are directly comparable. Savvy consumers buy the lowest...

This paper develops a model of global sourcing with culturally dissimilar countries. Production of final goods requires the coordination of decisions between the headquarter of a multinational firm and managers of their component suppliers. Managers of both units are assumed to have strong...

This paper analyses the impact of business process outsourcing (BPO) on firm productivity based on a comprehensive German firm-level panel data set covering manufacturing and service industries. The growing importance of service inputs into the production process is undisputed. Firms...