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Three Essays in Applied Microeconomics: A Microeconomic Study of Snacks, Beer, and Real Estate Agents

  • This dissertation comprises three essays. Although their titles make clear their self-contained nature, all essays share a common motivation: to combine economic theory with modern tools of causal inference to understand applied problems. The first chapter studies honesty when the costs to behave honestly change. Using field data from a snack delivery company that employs an honesty payment system, the chapter presents an event study to analyze how price increases affect pay rates. The honesty payment system expects customers to pay a listed price for each consumed snack. This allows me to measure honesty with the pay rate that compares consumption to payments. The results, which draw on deliveries from several thousand firms, show that price increases that make honest behavior more costly cause more cheating. Price increases of 15% trigger a fall in pay rates of 11%. The second chapter studies a recent legal reform in Germany, which aims to lower commission rates of real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform has backfired and real estate agents have exploited the transition to increase their commission rates. The findings document that in some regions real estate agents increase their commission by up to 2 percentage points, adding over e6,000 in transaction cost to the average home sale. As explicit collusion is unlikely in this setting, I argue that this arbitrary increase points to seller ignorance instead. To verify if and why sellers fail to induce price competition, I run a pre-registered survey experiment with 1,062 real estate agents. Although commission rates should be negotiated independently for each sale, the survey confirms that 85% of sellers do not attempt to negotiate lower commission rates. The randomized experimental questions suggest that real estate agents may cater to the low willingness of sellers to negotiate by providing misleading reference commission rates and shrouding the economic incidence for sellers. The third chapter is co-authored with Christian Traxler and Carsten Burhop and examines the causal effect of beer on crime based on unique panel data from Germany between 1882 and 1913. Using exogenous variation in the yield of spring barley, a key input in beer production, we identify a quantitatively and qualitatively significant effect of beer on violent crimes. This effect is mainly driven by a positive effect on assaults, where our findings suggest that a 1% increase in beer production raises assault rates by the same percentage. These findings are corroborated using a complementary empirical design that exploits a brewing tax reform in Prussia.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Julius Stoll
Advisor:Christian Traxler, Dorothea Kübler, Egon Tripodi
Hertie Collections (Serial Number):Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School (03/2024)
Publication year:2024
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2024/01/19
DOI:https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5326
Release Date:2024/02/22
Notes:
List of publications

Stoll, J. (2022). The cost of honesty: Field evidence. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 101, 101943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2022.101943

Stoll, J. (2023). How not to reduce commission rates of real estate agents: Evidence from Germany. Berlin School of Economics (Discussion Paper No. 26). https://doi.org/10.48462/OPUS4-5077
Notes:
Shelf mark: 2024D003 + 2024D003+1
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Licence of document (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - 4.0 International
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