This paper studies the effect of leadership on the level and evolution of pro-social behavior using an artefactual field experiment on local public good provision. Participants decide how much to contribute to an actual conservation project. They can then revise their donations after being...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

Most contracts, whether between voters and politicians or between house owners and contractors, are incomplete. "More law," it typically is assumed, increases the likelihood of contract performance by increasing the probability of enforcement and/or the cost of breach. This paper studies a...

It is shown that rent-seeking contests with continuous and independent type distributions possess a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium.

We analyse the all-pay auction with incomplete information and variance-averse bidders. We characterise the symmetric equilibrium for general distributions of valuations and any number of bidders. Variance aversion is a sufficient assumption to predict that high-valuation bidders increase their...

We study alternative institutional arrangements for the determination of monetary policy in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, where monetary policy has redistributive effects. Inflation is determined by a policy board using either simple-majority voting, supermajority...