A body of literature suggests that ethnic heterogeneity limits economic growth. This paper provides microeconometric evidence on the direct effect of ethnic divisions on productivity. In team production at a plant in Kenya, an upstream worker supplies and distributes flowers to two downstream...

We show that once interfamily exchanges are considered, Becker’s rotten kids mechanism has some remarkable implications that have gone hitherto unnoticed. Specifically, we establish that Cornes and Silva’s (1999) result of efficiency in the contribution game amongst siblings extends to a...

Adaptation is omnipresent but people systematically fail to correctly anticipate the degree to which they adapt. This leads individuals to make inefficient intertemporal decisions. This paper concerns optimal income taxation to correct for such anticipation-biases in a framework where consumers...

Under conditions of risk it makes a difference whether the discount rate is determined as an expected present or as an expected future value. This difference which is dubbed as the Weitzman-Gollier puzzle has stimulated an intensive discussion which, however, is somewhat confusing. In this paper...

Uncertainty has an almost negligible impact on project value in the economic standard model. I show that a comprehensive evaluation of uncertainty and uncertainty attitude changes this picture fundamentally. The analysis relies on the discount rate, which is the crucial determinant in balancing...

Climate is a persistent asset, bar none: changes in climate-related stocks have consequences spanning over centuries or possibly millennia to the future. To reconcile the discounting of such far-distant impacts and realism of the shorter-term decisions, we consider hyperbolic time-preferences in...

We use a public referendum on a new air traffic concept in Berlin, Germany as a natural experiment to analyze how the interaction of tenure and capitalization effects shapes the outcome of direct democracy processes. We distinguish between homevoters, i.e., voters who are homeowners, and...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Tradable black (CO2) and green (renewables) quotas gain in popularity and stringency within climate policies of many OECD countries. The overlapping regulation through both instruments, however, may have important adverse economic implications. Based on stylized theoretical analysis and...

Economic evaluation of projects involving changes in mortality risk conventionally assumes that lives are statistical, i.e., that risks and policy-induced changes in risk are small and similar among a population. In reality, baseline mortality risks and policy-induced changes in risk often...