This survey summarizes the classical fundamentals of modern deterrence theory, covers major theoretical and empirical findings on the impact of certainty and severity of punishment (and the interplay thereof) as well as underlying methodological problems, gives an overview of limitations and...

While vote-buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote-buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote-buying with an experiment-based measure...

In this paper, we investigate the long-run effects of World War II on socio-economic status (SES) and health of older individuals in Europe. Physical and psychological childhood events are important predictors for labor market and health outcomes in adult life, but studies that quantify these...

We provide an overview of the growing literature that uses micro-level data from multiple countries to investigate health outcomes, and their link to socioeconomic factors, at older ages. Since the data are at a comparatively young stage, much of the analysis is at an early stage and limited to...

This paper provides evidence about the quality of retrospective childhood health histories given to respondents in the HRS and the PSID. Even though information on early life health events is critical, there is legitimate skepticism about the ability of older respondents to remember specific...

Evidence from a sample of countries show that people roughly spend as much time watching television as earning their living. Moreover, television viewing and work hours are positively correlated across countries. A simple model based on complementarities in the organization of free time is...

I demonstrate that Ai and Norton’s (2003) point about cross differences is not relevant for the estimation of the treatment effect in nonlinear “difference-in-differences” models such as probit, logit or tobit, because the cross difference is not equal to the treatment effect, which is the...

Pension systems have recently been under scrutiny because of the expected population ageing threatening its sustainability. This paper's contribution to the debate is from a political economic perspective as it uses data from a choice experiment to investigate individual preferences for an...

Temporary and circular migration programs have been devised by many destination countries and supported by the European Commission as a policy to reduce welfare and social costs of immigration in destination countries. In this paper we present an additional reason for proposing temporary...