Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption....

We investigate how vertical unity within a community interacts with horizontal class divisions of an unequal income distribution. Community is conceptualized in terms of a public good to which all those in the community have equal access, but from which outsiders are excluded. We formulate the...

A taboo is an "unthinkable" action, that is, even the thought of violating it triggers social punishment. Taboos are the social "thought police," discouraging individuals from considering certain type of actions. We consider a simple model in which taboos are part of the definition of one's...

This paper analyses two features of concern to policy-makers in the countries of the prospective European Monetary Union: the solvency of their government’s finances; and the accuracy of fiscal forecasts. Extending the existing methodology of solvency tests, the paper finds that, with few...

This Paper studies the identification problem in infinite horizon Markovian games and proposes a generally applicable estimation method. Every period firms simultaneously select an action from a finite set. We characterize the set of Markov equilibria. Period profits are a linear function of...

Conventional wisdom suggests that aging of population will increase political pressure to tilt the composition of social spending in favour of the elderly, while potentially sacrificing other publicly provided goods such as education. This view seems to be supported by recent empirical findings...

In this chapter, we provide an overview on the literature on key players in networks. We first introduce the theoretical concept of the key player, which is the agent that should be targeted by the planner so that, once removed, she will generate the highest level of reduction in total activity....

We survey the literatures on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks. We develop a taxonomy of 'macro' and 'micro' characteristics of social inter-action networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the role of those characteristics in...

This study explores the effect of several personal religion-related variables on social behaviour, using three paradigmatic economic games: the dictator (DG), ultimatum (UG), and trust (TG) games. A large carefully designed sample of a Spanish urban adult population (N=766) is employed. From...

Can we identify the members of a community who are best- placed to diffuse information simply by asking a random sample of in- dividuals? We show that boundedly-rational individuals can, simply by tracking sources of gossip, identify those who are most central in a network according to...