Economic inequality is rising globally and due to developments in information technologies and globalization, nowadays individuals are more exposed to such an inequality than ever. Recent studies show that exposure to inequality may shape economic decisions. In this article, we test whether contributions in the public goods game are sensitive to information about inequality of personal benefits between ...
The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 14 contributions of the special issue on the “Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses,” the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the ...
We provide a description of ownership patterns in the top 25 European banks for the period 2003–2015, where we especially focus on the global financial crisis. Investment managers, such as Blackrock, are dominant in terms of number of block holdings in different banks, maintaining fairly stable “common ownership” networks throughout our sample. However, the financial crisis led...
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...
The green bond market has grown strongly in recent years, especially in the euro area. With regard to the European Union’s climate targets, it is likely that the demand for green bonds—bonds that specifically support sustainable projects— will continue to increase in the future. The European Central Bank (ECB) is buying green bonds as well and is planning to reorient its strategy towards more sustainability. ...
Venture capital (VC) is often seen as an instrumental tool that allows many start-ups to pursue innovation with the potential to shake-up current markets and/or to replace incumbents. Using a highly granular, project-level dataset from preclinical diabetes R&D, this paper shows that VCs actively steer the direction of R&D and streamline activities of research focused firms (pipeline firms)...
Both wages and needs-adjusted household income increased by ten percent between 2013 and 2018, benefiting all income groups. Wage inequality has been declining for many years and has now again reached the level of the early 2000s. At the same time, the low-wage sector shrank by two percentage points. Household income inequality, in contrast, has hardly changed for many years and the low-income rate ...
How does online advertising affect consumer behaviour, product pricing and competition? To analyse this, I develop a theory of digital markets where an intermediary provides a platform for firms to advertise their product and where consumers need to engage in costly search if they want to learn about the product characteristics. First, I show that when prices are observable...