This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems as a means to finance unemployment benefits: a...

In this paper we offer a meta-analysis approach to (simulation) studies on environmental tax reform (ETR). The underlying studies look both at environmental effects (e.g. reduction in CO2 emission) and economic effects (e.g. change in gross domestic product) following such a tax reform. The...

This paper examines the effects of taxation on long-run growth in a two-sector endogenous growth model with (i) physical capital as an input in the education sector and (ii) leisure as an additional argument in the utility function. The analysis of the effects of taxation - including income...

This study uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to examine the impact of different payment options on charitable giving. Households are randomly divided into three treatments, distinguished by the possibility for respondents to donate cash, by debit card, or both. I find that due to...

Although many researchers have investigated the value of open space in cities, few of them have compared them to the costs of providing this amenity. In this paper, we use the monocentric model of a city to derive a simple cost-benefit rule for the optimal provision of open space. The rule is...

Public action to prevent crime is often driven by concerns about public safety. But what generates those concerns ? ]s it crime, or something else ? Using survey data for Brazil, we find that the desire for greater public safety has a positive own-income effect, but a negative neighborhood-...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect of making "others' behaviour" a controlled variable, but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute the pool of subjects. This paper proposes and implements a new experimental design, the Conditional...

We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays a repeated public good game to a strangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations. Subjects in the partners condition contribute from the first period on significantly more to the public...

We provide an explanation why centralisation of political decision making

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...