1. Refereed Journal // forthcoming

    Birth Cohort Size Variation and the Estimation of Class Size Effects

    We show that in school systems with grade retention or redshirting birth cohort size is negatively related to the grade-level share of students who are too old for their grade. This compositional effect gives…

  2. Discussion and Working Paper // forthcoming

    Endogenous worst-case beliefs in first-price auctions

    Bidding in first-price auctions crucially depends on the beliefs of the bidders. We analyze bidding behavior in a first-price auction in which the knowledge of the bidders about the distribution of the values of…

  3. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-015 // 2025

    Competition Among Digital Services: Evidence From the 2021 Meta Outage

    On October 4, 2021, all services provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. (then Facebook, Inc.) became unavailable unexpectedly for all its worldwide users for a period of about six hours. We use detailed high‐frequency…

  4. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-014 // 2025

    Founder Personality and Scaling Decisions in Entrepreneurial Firms

    Personality drives human decision-making. Research on corporate research and development(R&D), however, typically considers strategic decision-making to be independent of the decisionmaker’s personality traits.…

  5. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-016 // 2025

    Skills, Job Application Strategies, and the Gender Wage Gap: Evidence From Online Freelancing

    This paper examines how worker skills and job application behavior contribute to the gender wage gap on a major online freelancing platform. We observe significant occupational sorting by gender, with women…

  6. Non-Refereed Journal // 2025

    Der Weg zu mehr Wirkungsorientierung im Bundeshaushalt

    In international comparison, Germany is considered a latecomer when it comes to performance budgeting. After clarifying the central concepts of goal- and impact-oriented budgeting and its historical foundations,…